3 Books Published by Flood Editions on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Poetry. Drama. African & African American Studies. THE PRIME ANNIVERSARY is comprised of a sequence of poems and a one-act play, common themes of which include number, measure, and the very idea of continuity. Drawing from Pythagorean sources and Spanish modernist poets, among others, Jay Wright examines arithmetical proportions and the limits of intonation that define harmony. Invoking Empedocles’ philosophy of love and strife, attraction and separation, the continuous and the discrete, Wright resurrects the pre-Socratic practice of exploring thought in verse.

"Drifting from New Mexico with lawman Elfego Baca to Ricardo Molinari’s Buenos Aires all the way back to ancient Alexandria, ’Disorientations: groundings’ offers an erudite and at times dizzying exploration of our mortal limits. Metaphysical in both content and manner of metaphor, these poems are in constant dialogue with the physical sciences, mathematics, and number theory. The result is a startling, quixotic, and truly original poetry"—P. 4 of cover.

Poetry. At once clear and hermetic, oracular and elegiac, MUSIC’S MASK AND MEASURE presents a series of five "equations" in a cosmic algebra. Drawing from such disparate sources as medieval theology, modern physics, and a Pythagorean sense of harmony, these poems offer glimpses of a dance in which only one partner can be seen. Reading them, we move in "the firm embrace/ of the unsolved." Jay Wright is the author of eight previous books of poetry that were collected in one volume, Transfigurations, in 2000; he won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2005.