Smallfield, Edward: To Whom It May Concern

Apogee Press, paperback

Publication Date: December 1, 2019

 Published: Ed Smallfield's TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN enters into the unfixity of time and experience. In this elusive realm, Smallfield unerringly finds the 'curve of binding energy' in which a protagonist who is an 'unself' emerges. Throughout Smallfield's lyric meditation, eros and erasure alternately fuse and efface until erasure becomes manifestation. Perhaps recollection creates sense of time's exile; Smallfield adeptly, bravely turns this inside out with 'a celebration that we own nothing.' His creative genius is to demonstrate the fullness of absence, whereby the poet can 'make a thing / by making / nothing.'â Elizabeth Robinson

To read TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN is to learn to listen to the world all over again. Whether focused outwardâ sludge, // soot slush, / slide tiresâ or inwardâ ... something about 'the music' in it...â or on familiar textsâ the green / 'of wrist-thick'â Ed Smallfield's exquisitely attuned language cultivates space for a greened attention, palpable and breathing. Here, silence and space also are fully alive, ... a sentence without words.... In his final, eponymous, section, Smallfield's profound attention to both presence and absence allows us to hear what beats just beneath the text of John Cage's Silence, a revelatory listening, in order to free / in it a space, an emptiness, // suddenly singing.â Laura Walker