Suppose a Sentence (2020)

This brand new book by Brian Dillon is a thoughtful confection devoted to the pleasures of the sentence. Each of the book's 28 short essays begins with one, from Shakespeare to Anne Boyer. 

Shakespeare's sentence comes from the deathly Hamlet -- "O, o, o, o."   -- as in, "-- the rest is silence. O, o, o, o." Dillon does not mention T.S. Eliot's use of the unpunctuated, all caps string of Os in Line 128 of "The Waste Land" -- "O O O O that Shakespearean rag --/ It's so elegant/ So intelligent" -- but that's to be expected -- even Eliot questioned the staying power of his best known poem.

For my part I played off Eliot's "O O O O" in the second poem of my hole-y O poem sequence from my book 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven (2018). "POtiOn" opens like this:

O O O O that Peruvian rag

the alpaca O O O who stOOd

fOr it O O beside O O the fire

(The attempt here was to do what poets Judith Copithorne and Steve McCaffery regretted of their early works, and that is mix concretist and expressive rhetorics -- the O an uncorked opening of the genie-releasing "Vial" in the previous poem, the first in my untitled sequence.)

Suppose a Sentence draws on a range of styles. Writers from all walks, including visual artists Robert Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (the cover is a montage by John Stezaker). Like the world's population, this book is comprised of slightly more women than men.