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Description:
“Check out CMYK. It is odd in a strange way, and that's something
hard to come by these days. A very particularizing and kind collaboration
with it all -- a roving, roaming, & re-reading risk—multicolored
“like” words. It says here: “we belong to the page or
the wall.”” —Rod Smith
“Michael Coffey's
CMYK is a sort of domino theory, or primary-color Braille, using word
replacement for sounds—that is, his words are as if movable spaces,
it being possible for these word-spaces like open, brilliant blanks or
Guston blocks to be plugged in elsewhere in space. The text ‘adds
to’ reality.”—Leslie Scalapino
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“Michael
Coffey’s CMYK collects numerous linguistic inventions. Coffey understands
the digital nature of the world he inhabits, yet remembers such poets
as Shakespeare, Hopkins, and Stevens, while embracing such contemporaries
as Andrews, Silliman, and Mac Low. The delighted reader is taken on literal—and
literary—travels deep inside this astonishing poet’s mind.”—Anne
Tardos
“In CMYK Michael
Coffey orchestrates a keen conceptualism that celebrates a polypoetics
of interceptions, détournes, contaminations, transpositions, cadgings,
listenings, substitution passes and reveries. Benjamin would have embraced
this work as the triumph of a flaneuristic sensibility, yet beyond its
meanderings through determining procedures and their strange outcomes
CMYK is a powerful, disturbing act upon all that is literature. Coffey
releases heterogeneous laws on the literary that open up the dark side
of language, its profoundly inhuman dimension felt as both obdurate distance
and disturbing proximity. For CMYK is language absolved of its need to
communicate anything other than its frightening remainder and potential.
A linguistic world in which the intertextual and the programmatic commingle
in paralogical yet over-determined neighborhoods, along streets or boulevards
where the Mojave Blancheur is made to rule as much as spaghetti is from
a mussel shell. Read it then ruminate on the vertiginous remainder Language
was, is and can be.”—Steve McCaffrey
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