Echo's Errand

Lyrically inventive, ekphrastic poems that interrogate art, race, and humanity's dark history. Juxtaposing references from Jacques Derrida with Kamau Brathwaite's Middle Passages, and Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," these are poems that enact language, art, and race like no other. In this debut collection from Keith Jones, many of the poems engage with, think through, or alongside of Cy Twombly paintings or the materiality of his sculptures or drawings. These poems enact a fascination, in language, or as utterance, with Twombly's color, his line's errantries, with his vanishing figures and sounds, with his sense of "history" as partial, palimpsestic, under erasure, and variously "voiced." But if Twombly is a painter of the Middle Sea, these poems conjure the longue durée of the Middle Passage. Twombly once wrote, "White paint is my marble." Here, the white is the page.