New advance review for ‘A Thing for Nothingness‘ through Reedsy Discovery:
Elegant, philosophical, and breathtakingly lyrical, Pablo Saborío’s A Thing For Nothingness is the kind of collection that poets of his generation aspire to. But Saborío has actually succeeded in the challenging work of bringing together compelling central concerns and questions with masterful execution of the verse. This accomplishment, as we can see from the brilliance of Saborío’s craft, results from experiencing poetry as an art of verbs—of doing, being, witnessing, accepting, and transforming in the paradoxical effort to define that which resists definition.
In a foreword to the collection, editor Ingrid Wilson traces (as best they can be traced) the projects of the book. Saborío has discovered images and arrangements that grapple with the paradoxes of true poetry, the art’s attempt to explain, describe, or define the things that challenge such clarity or make clarity impossible. In the poem “Epilogue to Poetics,” Saborío writes one of the most succinct essays on poetry in recent memory. He articulates poetry’s work of “distillation” and its tension with and friction against the very language used to make it. G.K. Chesterton would delight in the consciousness of paradoxes here (but it is also clear that Saborío’s preoccupation with them surpasses Chesterton’s in complexity).
Unsurprisingly, much of the power of Saborío’s work comes from his brilliant emphasis on the grammatical predicates. How could subjects made of nouns and their adjectives take center stage in a collection that so intentionally explores the challenges to definability? It is clear that movement, activity, feeling, observing, absorbing, and dreaming are the dynamic material that makes this collection so effective and affecting. And what’s more, so many lines manifest this effort in playful ways—wordplay, witty line breaks, clever associations. While Saborío’s work appears and is grand in its scope and accomplishment, there is no loss of pleasure in witnessing the ephemeral acrobatics of his lines.
A Thing For Nothingness is a must-read, though the reader should be prepared to approach the collection with openness and imagination. These poems should receive multiple readings, in part, so that the reader may catch all of the possibilities the poet has left us, but also to allow the music of this book to play in new iterations in our consciousness. Whether intentional or not, Saborío has managed to deliver a book that shows its reader both beautiful poetry and a vision of how poetic thinking works. Poets, especially, will find Saborío’s work validating and exciting, if sometimes also envy-inducing (it’s that good).
Review by Stephen Dudas, writer and scholar (PhD in Literature, Miami University)