Poetry. "In WIRES AND LIGHTS, Arlo Quint honors and replenishes the lineages of cubist collage poetry, appropriation, and, certainly, the antique contrarieties of North Asian poetry. Quint writes lines in straightforward diction while he shifts levels and attention, from outside himself to inside and back, and the friction of line to line, attention to attention attains its own kind of logic. The lines come in as if on tangents to a dense spherical center, which they outline. This core is not verbal but has a tone, a feel. These refine with repeated readings. When he ends a poem, it's not as if the poem resolves. It revolves, like a mirrored disco ball, dazzling and inscrutable. He treats the grand themes--time-space, death, illusion, history of the world, solitariness--in oblique, tenuously compatible fragments. As he says, 'whatever sense lost is recast as these irreducible parts.'" --John Godfrey