Nathaniel Mackey: By Bent Light

By Bent Light is comprised of five installments of the ongoing “Mu”/Song of the Andoumboulou series, excerpted en media res from volume two of Double Quartet, a work-in-progress. From the sulkiness of the dead to the insolence of so; from the Middle Passage making a comeback to the sounding of Black Atlantis; from Zvia’s charcoals to Petlin’s pastels; from an indefiniteness known as “things” to the wake of 1/6/21; from Brother B saying, “Vex, vex and more vex,” to quizzicals driving a Sufi aside; from the abandoned boy and girl in the Hard House to Tête’s mortgage on the moon; from David S. Ware live in Vilnius to Alice Coltrane’s “Oh Allah”; from naked Lake Supremacy to galleons on the ocean floor off Point Reyes; from the decanting of After to Huff proclaiming, “It’s all only one thing or another.”