Glosses and Ligatures
By Eric T. Racher
A Sequence of Sonnets
by Eric T. Racher
With a Critical Introduction and Commentary
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Eric T. Racher’s debut collection, the traditions of the sonnet sequence are contested, displaced and defamiliarized in a dialectic of constraint and rupture. Concerned with language, translation, form as an organizer of artistic and political life, the fashioning of the subject within poetic tradition, fictions of authorship and ownership, and of course the sonnet’s perennial subject, love, these 140 poems range from traditional Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets to free verse, prose and visual interpretations of the form. These poems juxtapose high seriousness with satire, mannerism with naturalism, the ostensibly pellucid and traditional with the nakedly experimental in which language twists into rhetoric, dissolves into numeric code, or gestures towards opacity. The sequence is accompanied by a critical introduction and commentary written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in which the great American essayist, philosopher and poet explicates difficult passages and sets the work in its social and historical context while exploring its sources and background.
Notices
“Erudite, witty, and cosmopolitan, Eric Racher’s investigation of the sonnet form shows that serious, intellectual poetry is still being made in the 21st century.”
—Ryan Ruby, author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
“Is the experimental impulse a virtue in itself? Perhaps. I feel more confident in asserting that experimentation grows in virtue if pursued not only with talent and skill, not only with a great deal of knowledge, not only with evident joy, but also with a love of the material in its initial form. By these standards, Eric T. Racher is a virtuoso of the literary experiment; indeed, he is a virtuoso by any measure. In his hands, the sonnet does things it has never done before, over and over, yet does not suffer, does not break down under pressure. One moves from entry to entry, ever more eagerly exclaiming, ‘O heart us then and rhyme us!’”
—Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood
Eric T. Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in Socrates on the Beach, minor literature[s], Nimrod, Hobart Pulp, Exacting Clam, Your Impossible Voice, Literary Imagination, Keep Planning, iamb, ballast, Radura Poetica, and elsewhere.