rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Force drift
    sub title: an essay in the epic
  name:
    name part: Pethybridge, Jeffrey
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: essay
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mau
    date issued: 2025
    copyright date: 2025
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: 222 pages ; 25 cm.
  abstract: In his extraordinary second collection, Jeffrey Pethybridge confronts the ethical disaster of the torture program that the United States used to advance the so-called global war on terror. The poems in Force Drift recall Gilles Deleuze's insight that art "is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces." Through the formal range of this dynamic sequence, Pethybridge achieves something like a synthesis of Deleuze's opposition whereby the invention of poetic form becomes the very means of capturing, registering forces, "a reckoning lyric." The task of reckoning, and rendering visible the violence of the state lies at the heart of the matter precisely because the state intends to conceal or justify its brutality through the invocation of emergency powers, and the state of exception, or the state disappears persons in its network of black site prisons. Moreover, as the political scientist Darius Rejali has demonstrated it is in fact democracies that have refined "invisible tortures" such as sensory deprivation, stress-positions and the waterboard. Working at the intersection of documentary poetics, and theories of the epic, Pethybridge recommits poetry to a responsibility for a description of history; as a poet-researcher, he asks "what would be possible if listening / were the leading-form of being." Driven equally by argument, abstraction and assemblage, the poems in Force Drift address themselves to the irreparable, the "trauma effect," within the war on terror's record of atrocity. Force Drift is cri de coeur, political critique and essay in the epic. Against the world-destroying violence of the US torture program, Force Drifts juxtaposes a catalog of energies, forms and genres, abolitionist, citational, architectural, chromatic, replete with visual poetries ranging from the arabasques of tzahibs to erasures to extreme measures of leading and kerning. Even when its language is reduced to the pure transcription of pain, aiai aiai aiai, Forc…
  note: Jeffrey Pethybridge.
  note: Poetry browsing collection : gift of Eleanor Weinbaum family.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: Torture
    genre: Poetry
  subject:
    topic: Political prisoners
    topic: Abuse of
    geographic: United States
    genre: Poetry
  subject:
    topic: Iraq War, 2003-2011
    topic: Prisoners and prisons, American
    genre: Poetry
  subject:
    topic: Iraq War, 2003-2011
    topic: Atrocities
    genre: Poetry
  classification: PS3616.E849 F67 2025
  classification: 811/.6
  identifier: 9781961209350
  identifier: 1961209357
  identifier: 2025007519
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 250409
    record change date: 20251017162402.5
    record identifier: in00005665174