The Great Wheel: Zero the Un-Naming

Kinnear charts the map from Herakleitos to Pound, Freud to Derrida, Celan, Rilke, Joyce. This is a text like no other, divining the naming and un-naming of things from zero through infinity in the way of the philosopher-poets. Alternating contemplations on immensities with crystalline poems that begin each chapter, spoked with Kinnear’s translations of Heraclitus, and spun with the dreams of memory, it’s a book to reach for again and again. We journey through memory/dream, chance/love, sleep/death, reason/no-reason, meaning/unmeaning, Khora at the gates of the unsayable, ‘vast as the cosmos she can contain.’ This book is not so much a statement about where poetry comes from as it is an inside-view of poetry becoming itself, happening now, unfolding on the page before us. No doubt the Pre-Socratic [Herakleitos] would be proud to chop logic with the author, and sing his praises for this astonishing new work, says author Susan Lynch. Kinnear was the winner of Fine Madness’ 2003 Nelson Bentley prize. He is the author of ‘A Walk in Bardo’ (Blue Begonia Press 2008), ‘Heart Range’ (Raven Chronicles), ‘Shale Eyes’ and ‘My Father’s House’ (Taurolog, 2012 and 2014).