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Moten’s edges are little, after all, though not so much diminutive as localized, intimate, often soulful, and serialized in movement that asks continually to be negotiated anew.Īs the poems spool forth across the page, their provisional structures split apart or break down, a process that Moten seems to describe when he writes, “Make a prompt a foursquare then the squares collapse as separates but other than before till work is made to disappear to register its fields as present in the sound and its sources.” The line’s temporary armature disintegrates, but the poem itself is sustained by the verbal energies that bear it along. But the poems, though squarely in an “experimental” mode, aren’t chilly or forbidding. Quite the contrary. Wandering far from language’s imperial center, where speech is presumed to be transparent and stable, Moten brushes up against the edges of what can be communicated in words, and isn’t shy about venturing beyond them. He toys with nonsense and inventive new spellings, and his many allusions, drawn from a vast storehouse, can be opaque. The title of Fred Moten’s latest collection, The Little Edges, pinpoints the border country where his poetry unfolds. Cover of ‘The Little Edges’ by Fred Moten