The micropoetics of Lagniappes calibrates the distance between minimalist and minimal, slighted and slight, quoted and quotidian. If poetry is often the site for powerful emotions, urgent politics, or intimate confession, here it seeks to register and recreate the ephemeral tremors of the everyday. The language effects are minor, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re not significant. Like finding a quarter in the vending machine, just when you’re short: it’s not a big deal (only a few cents), but it might change your mood for the rest of the afternoon. Against the current tendency to subsume all verse to “lyric,” these poems recall some of the many non-lyrical forms that once flourished: epigram, riddle, epistle, graffiti, fratrasie, salut . . . .

Craig Dworkin’s most recent books include Helicography (Punctum, 2021), Radium of the Word (Chicago, 2020), and Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (Fordham, 2020). He teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah.

Hiding Press Chapbooks 06
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42pp

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