Praise for STRUCTURES the MOMENT (approx.)
[P]ablo lopez’ Structures the Moment renders a meta-lingual field to appear as anti-lingual frequency where language questions its rational primacy, like a graph of ironic tautology attempting to encircle its own status by questioning its conventional primacy via ironic aridity.
—Will Alexander
What is lexical spirit? How much does it reveal at any time? How much does it withhold? Does it behave differently during recon as it does during grief? What threatens its moves? What protects them? Does it enable the Bureaus or merely haunt them? These and other questions occupy the pages herein—and be sure to include a variety of best- and worst-case characters in your password.
—George Albon
Bands of black redaction or bandage, caves in the cliff face of a word. Climb inside, open your eyes, see in the dark. Without alphabets pablo lopez writes, unwrites – shows how “You’d have to be inside the needle,” or writing is “a paved road,” mail slot, missing subtitle, taped mouth, blindfold, band over eyes of an anonymous subject, grave marker for those unseen in life. Structures the Moment uses time as its fluorescence. But only approximately. Not a clock, constructions and deferrals, lyric that decays while counting: “Which is / What I wanted / Hapax lyric / darker semblant.” Into this envelope Lopez puts names, objects, especially transitional, scenes of disappearance, primarily of women artists and poets, makes visible the usually not: women’s work: their faces that make by facing, the child, each other, eye to eye bonds, imprint, contact. This book is a faceoff. A love poem in grid to the post office – elegies to attempted deliveries mailed off from the most beautiful “Song of Myself” I’ve ever encountered, made of punctuation only, page as a face.
—Susan Gevirtz