Notation by Jordan Dunn

Notation, by Jordan Dunn

coming Winter 2024/25

Coming soon

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Book description

Notation consists of a single poetic line that navigates the contours of memory following the death of a friend. Broadened by companionship, reading, nature study, and travel, Notation questions the boundaries of book and authorship, weaving numerous texts together with close observations of daily life. For Jordan Dunn, “the idea of the perfect book remains thousands of unbound sheets, photographs, and notes spread across a vast table.” The practice of taking note, of writing the now as it happens, gathers the living—the people we haven’t lost, those here with us in time.

Praise

Grief tears up our roots and sets us astray in the world, and leaves us, if we’re lucky, as nothing more than a seed in a gale; and hope’s lonely question might only ask, how grow a root again? Jordan Dunn’s extraordinary Notation isn’t an elegy exactly, but is an elegy superlatively, seeking through attention so focused on the worldly it borders on prayer. Part field guide, part daybook, part friendship journal, part shepherd’s calendar, part pilgrim’s quest, part mourner’s placeless lament, these poems offer daily detail as intimate revelation. I don’t know if it can save us, but might well be the best company I can imagine in time’s general doom. What higher praise is there? These are poems that leave us, in our unbreakable solitude, less alone. So the root lets itself grow. – DAN BEACHY-QUICK

About the author

Jordan Dunn is the author of Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press) as well as various chapbooks and ephemeral prints including Common Names, Reactor Woods, and A Walk at Doolittle State Preserve. He lives with his family in Madison, WI, where he edits and publishes Oxeye Press.