glost // Nathan Austin 61 pp, handsewn $10	"Really, somewhere, Noah Webster has tears in his eyes. A poet has found him, and stirred up his words, roused up his definitions, and brought him happily back to life, a livelier life than he probably ever had. Here he is, dancing, as word witty as Baudelaire, and he has put aside his Protestant clunkiness. A lovely book, superb poetic writing, and give my congratulations to Kristen for producing it." -- Neil Schmitz, University of Buffalo "thanks for the nathan austin book. it is beautiful to look at and interesting to read. i very much enjoyed it. -- Juliana Spahr "I forgot to let you know how much I enjoy (glost). It is absolutely beautiful. The work moving and the whole edition works together. It is strange how close my current work is to the spirit here. I think you will see when it comes out (if ND doesnt reject it) next April. I mean the definition obsession." -- Susan Howe "This is to thank you both for sending me a copy of _glost_, which I like very much. It's a beautiful book, both in physical design and textual content. I read _articulation_ (or its imagined opposite) as being the book's pivotal conceit. "To make inarticulate, or _sweet_, sounds": _glost_ aligns inarticulateness with sweetness, a conjoining that performs its own unlikely logic. Here, inarticulacy is both "a manner that forbids disclosure" and a way to "pronounce more than is needed." Sweetness, folding, secrecy, closeness/closure, needles, stitches, knots, fingers, teeth, tongues, organs--these and other sensuous lexical threads make up an integument of fabrics, knit loosely together to create a desirous tapestry that seems to unravel upon reading, leaving verbal ghost-images, vivid but difficult to retrace. Noah Webster's own ghost superintends the pages, directing each entry toward a specialized (in-)definition, a glossing "across the map-ends" of speech. Above all, _glost_ is intimately personal without glozing any fixed subjective identity on either side of the page, and sensitive about feelings even when most admonitory: "Be careful! grasping the tongue is with care. Thanks again." -- Kasey Mohammad As Nathan says in the brief note opening his book, "Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828): a protracted definition of an emerging nation-state; the narrative of its author's conversion; an attempt to restore a language to roots that precede the Tower of Babel. As such, it can be read as a map of a wilderness; but it is also a wilderness unto itself, haunted by countless ghosts, within which the reader becomes lost. These poems record of a series of encoutners with those ghosts." -- Kristen Gallagher, Handwritten Press To download this eBook, visit the E-Library. Required: free adobe acrobat reader.