Quipu appears courtesy of Copper Canyon Press. All rightsreserved.

Quipu are knotted cords used for record-keeping in Incacivilization, and, Sze reminds us, by the ancient Chinese. As in earlierwork, Sze (The Redshifting Web) weaves together details fromnature (especially from New Mexico, where he lives), questions fromphilosophy, and discoveries from modern physics, collecting facts with aThoreau-like patience. To the hints of Taoism some readers have found inhis previous work, Sze adds a focus on domestic life and erotic love.Liminal encounters between people and animals, lovers and strangers,even rocks, fish and sky, create a poetry of simultaneity, and acontemplative mindset: “A moment in the body,” he writes, “is beauty’smemento mori: when I rake gravel in/ a courtyard, or sweep apricotleaves off a deck,/ I know an inexorable inflorescence.” Sometimes Szehas trouble putting his details together, letting the poems andsequences go on too long, or degenerate into mere lists. As in the verseof Charles Wright, however, powers of observation give the best poemsand sequences undeniable energies, whether considering a bowl, a candleor a tile in Sze’s own living room, or else watching as “a broad-tailedhummingbird whirs in the air—/ and in a dewdrop on a mimosa leaf/is the day’s angular momentum.”

—Publishers Weekly

Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze’spoems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematicrecording of a flower’s blooming: the seed of an idea is germinated,thought or feeling buds, then the poem blooms entire. Sze has arefreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writinglike a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole.This approach feels simultaneously familiar and radical because thepoems are distilled to essentials we can grasp (an object, a sensation,a thought), but arranged in such odd order that readers will naturallywant to search for associative meaning. This quality may make Sze’spoems seem too abstract or confounding to some readers. Yet, if onesimply allows the poems in (in the same breathlike way Sze inhales theworld, filters it through his perception, and exhales it back), theywill resonate in surprising ways.

—JanetSt. John, writing for Booklist

Leave it to Arthur Sze to find a single image that intimates both thepoetic form and thematic content of his latest book. Like quipu, thecomplex Incan data-recording system of assembling colorful knottedcords, Sze plaits isolated moments into tight, chromatic poems thatdilate the cross-cultural consonance, though not universality, of humanexperience. Sze loops birth and death, certainty and mystery, and theresonant moments of clarity that knot those poles, into a prismatictextile of broad human dimensions.Quipu is testament to the rare balance of intellectual mass, surrealmovement, and the rich image-scape of classical Chinese poetry that Szesince his 1982 collection Dazzled has progressively refined inhis work.

—Elizabeth Zuba

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Arthur Sze, born in New York City in 1950, is asecond-generation Chinese American. Educated at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Sze is the author of seven volumes of poetry,including Archipelago (Copper Canyon, 1995), River River(Lost Road, 1987), Dazzled (Floating Island, 1982), TwoRavens (1976; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1984), The WillowWind (1972; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1981), TheRedshifting Web: Poems 1970—1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998),a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and, mostrecently, Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005). Sze directs the CreativeWriting Program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe,New Mexico, where he has taught for more than a decade. He becamewell-known in New Mexico as a distinctive and compelling presence in thepoetry of the region, and was co-publisher, with John Brandi, of Toothof Time books. He has won numerous awards; an Asian American LiteraryAward, a Balcones Poetry Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’sAward, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, anAmerican Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, three WitterBynner Foundation for Poetry Fellowships, two National Endowment for theArts Creative Writing Fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner HowardFoundation Fellowship, a New Mexico Arts Division InterdisciplinaryGrand, and the Eisner Prize, University of California at Berkely. Hispoems have also appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and hehas conducted residences at Brown University, Bard College and theNaropa Institute. Rich in allusions, his poetry evinces a preferencefor Asian juxtaposition rather than Western rhetoric. Sze made his debutas an equally exceptional translator with the publication of The SilkDragon (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), which follow the trajectory ofSze’s interests in Chinese literature, from the classic T’ang masters,Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu to important contemporary poets such as WenI-to and Yen Chen. (The Silk Dragon was featured in a previousissue of The Drunken Boat along with a selection of work, and an interview with Sze.