Consisting of a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, a series of letters to More, and a poem called “THE WORLD” about Utopia’s vexed escape, Grace Nissan’s The Utopians cuts up and breaks into the language circumscribing the perfect world. With this stirring formal exploration of liberation, Nissan deftly occupies an in-between space, aiming a rigorous poetic eye at the present to interrogate ghosts of the future.
Excerpt:
account of the origin
you didn’t accept
as though having a good memory
the great army of unemployed
music
