The Spectra (Meander Scar)

Poetry. If what you relish about thought is its heft, velocity, its unpredictability, then Fred Muratori's THE SPECTRA will transport you. Visceral particulars—Batman, buzzsaws, wax-lustered cars, beef, and, yes, even Roy Orbison—propel readers beyond finitude in blunt cascades of 15 lines. Enjambments facilitate speed, precariousness, volatility while asking: "What if everything we think, from first synaptic spark to the last, is one thought, continuously digressive?" Parsed out in 13 syllables per line, life besieges readers as Muratori charts the source of the unsayable. Locomotion and elocution bring us to life's brim, to the subliminal spectra therein. One could cite Kant, Leibnitz and Wittgenstein to explain how Muratori twists conventional notions of meaning formation. The poet himself tips his hat to Wallace Stevens and others who fall into consciousness—Dupin, Bronk, Dahlberg, and Zukofsky. THE SPECTRA's thoughts-about-thought clang and balk, surprising us all.