Nathaniel Mackey: "An ashen finesse"

His writing, a vivid singularity, an incursion, sidelong, metamorphic with philosophical incision. It is language as susurrant usage, as hypnotic sonar, incantatory, as it connects the abyss of the mind to its empyreal upper extremes. Which simultaneously allow his passages to hover, dart, rebel, poised as they are by inward prestidigitation as balance.

Again, a lyrical index of sonar, like permutations gathered from radial eclipse patterns. Replete in the fiction and the poetry is the spin and counter-spin, much in common with "the vibratory field" of Mayan numerical identity. There emerges from his compost of themes, an electrical summa, unlimited in its ability to soar and disrupt itself, and just as quickly momentarily condense itself from angles that astonish. For instance, in the first few pages of Bedouin Hornbook, he crosses Egypt and Haiti with the voice of Ogotemmeli. Make no mistake, whenever one has contact with the writing of Nathaniel Mackey, one is immediately ensnared by its sense of vatic weaving. As he says in his poem, "Dogon Eclipse," "I see no boats but hear the waters break." Thus, reading his work is like picking up odors, and transposing scents, like oneiric contradiction and blending.

Not a dubious refraction, but an incendiary sensation which obliterates division between the waking life and the tree of dreaming. And this sensation exists as a simultaneous canal between the poetic works and the fiction, combined by language which empowers them like waters which kindle. An occulted flair if you will, fueled in the sapience of infected calligraphy. And by infected, I mean a nomadic calligraphy, wandering, spinning off dark incalculable rhythms, its overtones humming like a compost of entanglement.

Both his poetry and his fiction partake of a level existing outside the stable zodiac of definitives. I mean, the stabilized invicta, the compartmentally rendered. Much the way a Bedouin's movements correspond with the waves of the sands. In this sense, Nate Mackey coheres as a pilgrim of the uncharted, who stutters throughout the mantic, skittish, unassembled spinning. It seems he has absorbed a basic chronicle of hearing indigenous to that level of mind unaffected by Western mental bifurcation. And this realia of bifurcation is nothing more than a harvest of restriction, which concludes that Europe and the northern lands of the Americas possess the culminate criteria by which the accredited must exist. This is a condition which Wilson Harris addresses as the "block function," which sanctions a reality which excludes unprecedented thoughts, and peoples, and utopian splendor of language. Now to draw character upon such exclusivist's rapport is not something you will find in any of Mr. Mackey's fiction. It is not character focused by monolithic sculpting, but character as fluidic awareness. Lambert, Drenette, Penguin, Aunt Nancy function simultaneously as distinct, but collective presences, like a whole magnetically aligned with its parts. And I do not mean alignment in a linear sense, but in the manner in which prestidigitation harmonizes by means of angular, unexpected impact. Lambert, Drenette, Penguin, and Aunt Nancy exist as magical rivulets of insinuation. Not in the manner of dramatic denouement, or accessible frictive, but as essentials of permutation. These characters respirate for me, like the magic aftermath of an unsullied breathing. Not as labored creations from a preplanned litterateur, but characters who take on the presence of an interior vivacity.

Having said such, one never feels committed to the limits of a character's axial limitations, to a life which accrues within the depth of static acreage. On the contrary, there are shifts, erosions, fractals, loopings. Therefore, each of his dated entries exists as a tool, as a necessity which sculpts the improvisational dust, like "a curious borderline stance between the compelling and the merely compulsive." A statement which simultaneously referents the beatific twilight of both Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus's Run. The latter creations being riveting circular meditations on the state of the creative nomad, the blend of the writing being of quixotic vertigo. Yes, movement as insubordinate precipitation, where one gets...