The test of a true poem, Stephen Vincent writes, is how not to die for it. How can a book that chills you to the bone—As Jack Spicer’s Language surely does—become a structuring, challenging, politicizing and even comforting recurring presence through forty years of a life lived under its spell? With a hard-won, contrarian patience, Vincent applies the test, and the hope he finds at the end is all the more convincing for the precarious-ness of the path it takes through the silent gap between No and One listens to poetry. —Peter Manson Stephen Vincent's engagement with Jack Spicer's poetry goes arguably farther back than anyone who wasn't a friend or acquaintance. What is not arguable is the generative richness of that engagement. Having been sent Spicer's Language by a friend while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Nigeria poised on the brink of civil war, he finds in its "uncomfortable music" a poetry uncannily expanding the borders of meaning. Cast in the creative-epistolary form of Spicer's own After Lorca, this book is a tactful it respects the intransigence of the poems, and tries, in the gentlest of ways, to understand the man who wrote them. After Language is a meditation on interpretive migration, on the troubled paths of poetic inheritance, and on the tangled, fraught (and yes, magical) ways that poetry survives it makers. —George Albon