Review of 4X1

With poetry anthologies always determined by geography, genre, genus, gender, or group dynamics, it’s a joy to come across one that presents an odd assemblage of writers and unseen connections.  In 4 X 1 Pierre Joris, a Luxembourgian now residing in America, presents a strange cross-cultural, multilingual, quasi-temporal grouping that at first catches the browser’s roving eye just by being disparate, contradistinctive,  and yet inviting.  The book includes a section from an unlikely quartet of poets, each translated into English by Joris, an interpreter and translator of note.  But what makes it even more labyrinthine and delightful in the lingual sense is that each of the poets is a polyglot and multi-linguist in their own right.  The texts are gloriously ravelled.

(ctd. here)