"Raymond de Borja has been at the cutting edge of innovative poetry for some time. His self-reflexive poesis carries forward the bold work of modernism into inventive new valences. Now he gives us a book of essays and meditations that are equally rich, strange, and compelling. Ranging from Jack Spicer, to the genre of the daybook and the poetics of lineation in Hejinian, Stein, Guest, and Berssenbrugge, to visual art, these essays thrill with their vivid illuminating investigations. the dust of a contact that is everywhere is bold and visionary – it is not to be missed!" - Patrick Pritchett, author of Make It Broken: Toward A Poetics Of Late Modernism "Out of language forged from attentive engagements with philosophy, art, and poetry, Raymond de Borja takes us to this place of moving potentiality, this occasion that is the dust of a contact that is everywhere. Intertwining friendship with form, de Borja traces and teases out the threads of this lush correspondence, moving the reader to apprehend the various kinships inscribed in poems as well as poetry's peculiar means to convene and cultivate kinships. Alongside a keen awareness of the "feeble outer power" of poems, de Borja offers a compelling demonstration of the ways that poetry reworks how we sense and make sense of the world, refuting the seemingly ineluctable capture by empire and capital of our very capacity to perceive. To read this book is to experience the kindness and generosity of a true friendship, as it invites the reader to inhabit a "shared, common strangeness" that I take to be a hope-filled "space in which we could live a creative life." - Conchitina Cruz ""Instead of figuring out the conditions of trust,/ I decided to trust my own condition," says the speaker of Xuela Zhang's moving new collection, To Compare. In Zhang's vision, language is material, the palpable vehicle for love's metaphysics. In these gorgeous poems "the lurking interior/ becomes precise," transforming into a physical – and deeply painful – lyric. Although this is a debut collection, the voice of its speaker is ancient and wise. To read Zhang's poetry is to walk among the language objects – transfixing monuments to love and loss, ambivalence and paradox. I want to come back to this meditative collection again and again, observing its beautiful, faceted language from new and subtle angles." - Katy Lederer
