In the Mode of Disappearance

“Jonathan Weinert’s award-winning collection, In the Mode of Disappearance, transcends contemporary categories of traditional and experimental, existing in a mode in which the quality of thought itself is paramount. Like Wallace Stevens and William Blake before him, his is a poetry that reaches the summit of philosophy without being shorn of song. Throughout the collection, Weinert draws upon a range of classical and postmodern strategies, dexterously integrating them with a series of non-poetic modes and constructs (including the four cardinal directions, the nine non-zero digits and the major arcana of the Tarot) in a humane effort to build a bulwark against the forces of fragmentation and disappearance. In so doing, Weinert’s poems forge a continuum of human knowledge in which, as Edith Sitwell once wrote, “the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind” are one.”—Brenda Hillman