Eliot Cardinaux: Starlings

Starlings, the sixth book of poems released by Eliot Cardinaux within the span of a year, follows what by now are two interwoven, ongoing cycles — serial poems begun, by turns, in The Ocean from Here to Here and Wandering Subject (2025). This book charts a course through murmurations of contemporary disaster along the threadbare edge of a history at once personal, political, and poetical. With Pierre Joris, Mireille Gansel, Matthew Shipp, and others as his guide, the poet skirts this edge as a witness to music both heard and unheard on the road-becoming-home to a poetry that is lived.

“The book is a box. Of paradoxes, of poems. What so few poems want, these want: to be read and be reread. As poems, as maps, as border crossings and wrecked small boats, as labyrinths within labyrinths, words within words. As much music, they possess crystalline silence. As destructible as they are, not one atomic piece of this silence can be removed. Lying the truth of haphazardness. Since not even the strangers who come to visit in these poems are haphazard. Strangers I recognize in the middle of life’s way. Strangers who will write poems in a past that never happened. Who tell of secrets, of poems to be read, of poets to love. These poems trap us in a fucking cage that they give us the tools to take apart. If you know, you will remember. If you don’t know, you will learn. Fall into these poems and be damned. Footnotes to a poetics of the new millennium.”

–John Phillips

“BIRDS LIVE! . . . Like great music, or like great graffiti, the poetry of Eliot Cardinaux is a veritable echo chamber of allusion and improvisation. It is as if, as one of his poems has it, the poem is “another instrument / thinking for itself.” So many of the poems were composed at other artists’ performances, arising from the interstices of hearing and thought. We are given to such complex vocalizations here, murmurations as it were, concerts of the birds.”

–A.L. Nielsen

Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, publisher, and translator working at the edges of the lyric and improvised music. He is the author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), six other poetry collections, and numerous chapbooks. He has also appeared on over a dozen albums of original music, beginning with American Thicket from Loyal Label in 2016, featuring Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen, as well as, most recently, Imminence, with percussionist Gary Fieldman (self-released, 2023). He studied jazz and improvisation at Manhattan School of Music and New England Conservatory (BM, 2016), as well as poetry and creative writing at UMass Amherst (MFA, 2022). He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press through which he has published books and chapbooks by such poets as Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, Sarah Menefee, Andrew Mossin, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi, Mark Scroggins, Norman Finkelstein, Denver Butson, and others. He lives in Northampton, MA.

Cover image by Tasha Robbins.