King of Infinite Space by Anna Priddy

Anna Priddy‘s The King of Infinite Space not only stems from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but renews it — making us re-see Hamlet’s famous words in a new light as well as giving us a new, thrilling darkness. These poems turn phrases we thought we knew (whether scholar or lay reader) on their ears…and then gives voice to those we didn’t realize we had:

Dead men, though, dead men I like and the words

they left for me stir the blood and the mind,

as if increase of appetite had grown

by what it fed on. My ear, I will keep,

but my voice I will give to everyone.

–Mark Yakich is a poet, novelist, painter, and the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Author, most recently, of football, Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide, and Spiritual Exercises

The King of Infinite Space tenderly oscillates among death and intimacy, a yearning for an ending that will not come, for an ending that keeps coming. The poems radiate into infinite space, crossing dimensions, temporalities, stages, and play. In one vestibule: time. In another: gradient. The poems are a series of passing moments, lost scents, secrets of language and text, of ectoplasm pages. The poems are a series of textured intimations. The thing inside the poem summons us. The thing inside the poem breathes. And as it breathes it bleeds us, and as it bleeds a boy jumps, and as a boy jumps a girl reads beside water, in a garden, lying on green velvet, and it is like this, the poems ask us to remember: the ear, the poison, the wind, the ghost, the swear, the words, the lie, of space, of shaped prose, of work, of lyric.

–fahima ife, Maroon Choreography