In this dazzling cycle of poems, Doug Nufer, wizardly author of poetry and prose works based on formal constraints, starts with a simple constructive rule, exemplified by its title: present a sequence of letters, grouped into a word or words; follow it by the same sequence, differently grouped; repeat. This foundational principle, ruthless in its purity, gives rise, like a jazzy passacaglia, to the most diverse forms, whose endless variations murder and reproduce like cellular automata creeping across the page. In the mind and ear of the reader, meanings, rhythms and sounds burst into dizzying presence and are swept away with ebullient panache. Nufer's art here is a high-energy high-wire act of wit, joining formal severity with frivolity and making stops at all points in between. Don't be afraid, Reader, to take the local and spend some time on this tour, bar-hopping with your precise yet whimsical guide across an initially alien but ultimately friendly and stimulating spaceyou will end up welcoming the cheerful pop of your newly effervescent brain exploding.

In Metamorphosis, Doug Nufer first metamorphoses The Metamorphosis, Kafkas famous story, by subjecting a composite English translation of Kafkas full text to anagrammatic transformations that carefully retain the semantic outline of the original, but submerge it into the bubbling stew of zany detail that emerges from Nufers richly inventive, often hilarious, and strangely beautiful wordplay. Then he turns his attention to an iconic excerpt from the beginning of the German text, rendering it into a dizzyingly diverse series of shapes and effects by various technical means in a virtuosic demonstration reminiscent of Queneaus Exercises in Style. I wonder where my project belongs, Nufer writes in an afterword; Maybe the appeal of venturing into a maze of translations and other constraints is analogous to the appeal a traveling salesman living with his parents and sister at the turn of the last century might have felt when, at the end of another awful day of work, he took up his needles to play.

In this dazzling cycle of poems, Doug Nufer, wizardly author of poetry and prose works based on formal constraints, starts with a simple constructive rule, exemplified by its title: present a sequence of letters, grouped into a word or words; follow it by the same sequence, differently grouped; repeat. This foundational principle, ruthless in its purity, gives rise, like a jazzy passacaglia, to the most diverse forms, whose endless variations murder and reproduce like cellular automata creeping across the page. In the mind and ear of the reader, meanings, rhythms and sounds burst into dizzying presence and are swept away with ebullient panache. Nufer's art here is a high-energy high-wire act of wit, joining formal severity with frivolity and making stops at all points in between. Don't be afraid, Reader, to take the local and spend some time on this tour, bar-hopping with your precise yet whimsical guide across an initially alien but ultimately friendly and stimulating spaceyou will end up welcoming the cheerful pop of your newly effervescent brain exploding.

In Metamorphosis, Doug Nufer first metamorphoses The Metamorphosis, Kafkas famous story, by subjecting a composite English translation of Kafkas full text to anagrammatic transformations that carefully retain the semantic outline of the original, but submerge it into the bubbling stew of zany detail that emerges from Nufers richly inventive, often hilarious, and strangely beautiful wordplay. Then he turns his attention to an iconic excerpt from the beginning of the German text, rendering it into a dizzyingly diverse series of shapes and effects by various technical means in a virtuosic demonstration reminiscent of Queneaus Exercises in Style. I wonder where my project belongs, Nufer writes in an afterword; Maybe the appeal of venturing into a maze of translations and other constraints is analogous to the appeal a traveling salesman living with his parents and sister at the turn of the last century might have felt when, at the end of another awful day of work, he took up his needles to play.