Words the Interrupted Speak

Paul B. Roth, author of such essential collections as Fields Below Zero, is a master of the poem en prose. In this new open sequence dedicated to the genre, he creates a landscape of upstate New York wherein each man and woman exists in a loneliness of asphalt and chill. Yet the voice of the poet, woven throughout the book, is that of a man who listens to the achingly silent fields and nights. He hears rust, frozen creeks, stone, stray fawns, and the seeds that sprout inside words; and because he is willing to stop and listen, he knows his name, daily traffic, and language are both exit and existence, a desolation he has the courage to behold in snowdrifts and in the flight of crows, letting the reader be his companion in this recuperation of language and loss...in this sacramental relationship we are lucky enough to experience. --Anthony Seidman This book is a house with a thousand rooms, each room containing a thousand houses, each house containing a ventriloquist with a thousand voices, saying, "I want to be so much a part of this room that its windows will only open when I breathe." Words the Interrupted Speak is exquisite, incisive. It continually surprises with its diamond-tipped images and the depth of its emotions. These are poems spoken in the midst of the ultimate interruptions: our mortality and our death. Paul B. Roth speaks in a whole new language created from spaces between the old letters. This book is a jewel box as big as a building. In discerning the self in relation to cultural conflict and metaphysical crises, Roth discovers the visceral and elemental. He writes, "Groping for my own face, I touch nothing but rock, earth, roots and their water." This book is a jewel box full of light and stone, rock and root. --Patrick Lawler