The Pink

Poetry. THE PINK offers a sequence of short poems with a detourned ear and an earnest intelligence. Condensing the remarkable craft of the long series Schlesinger chose as his debut volume, 2007's HELLO HELICOPTER, THE PINK reminds us that, as in language, "There are plenty of rivers in the sea / But you can't step on the same fish twice.""THE PINK: the color of course, or the recurrent carnations among the gathered leaves of this little bouquet, but also the sheer force of the form, the shear of a kind of textile cut, jagged and precise—a kind of coup de grace—not just between lines but also opening the serrated space between letters to reveal the 'hue' in 'house' or to separate the 'ink' from the 'inkling,' the 'blue' from the 'print.' To distinguish, in other words, the abstract plan from the material written form. In that linguistic pinking, Kyle Schlesinger cuts both into and against the weave, an angular slide into the inframince space of 'the leading of a phrase' (both the leading question of rhetoric and the spacing of letterforms), somewhere 'between the chair and the thought of it' (where chair is the French for 'body'), or 'the sensation of a concept' and 'the concept of a sensation.' Here is the world, of words, in miniature, through rose-colored magnifying glasses."—Craig Dworkin