Description

The Absence of Zero is a triumphantly-executed celebration of the Canadian tradition, the long poem. Consisting of 256 16-line quartets, and 34 free-form interruptions, this slow-moving haunting work is a beautiful example of "thinking in language," a meditation that explores time and memory in both content and form. The 20th century is already more than 20 years past: The Absence of Zero is Kolewe's elegy to that era, and the disparate fragments of its ideas that continue to affect and disrupt our present.

Praise for R. Kolewe:

"Kolewe enacts a curious, seemingly imperceptible talent for rendering nostalgia party to a mode of true grace, not the flatly sentimental, but instead this work invokes the cool gravity of viewing one's self-but-not seated alone in a quiet room, seemingly suspended forever in a discrete moment of space-time." --Liz Howard, Griffin Poetry Prize winning author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent