Algorithms

John Allman’s prose poems in Algorithms go forth in a kind of wanderjahr to discover or be discovered. These prose poems possess a different kind of urgency, a vitality that almost defies boundaries, a freedom to span discourses and leap across vocabularies. Allman is free to follow his mindful wanderings, landing us in Croatia in 1991, navigating with Columbus in 1492, witnessing a drug bust, watching his wife’s root canal, and examining the frozen remains of princess in Siberia. At the same time, the notion of an algorithm, the idea that, given a certain origin, a thing in process must become x or y, provides a way of understanding that each poem encompasses a fate, destined to become only itself-in essence, that boundaries are inherent in being. Ultimately, this points to Allman’s unresolved conundrum: the desire to be something beyond one’s self, but one can never escape one’s own being, and its limits-for what then would I and Not-I be?