Endurable Infinity

Tony Kitt at once renews and preserves the spirit of surrealist poetry. His sense of wonder is cast in the colors of film noir. This poet does not fear to introduce sly ironies into the very cusp of verbal revelation, starting with the book’s title Endurable Infinity. As bravely as Lautréamont and Artaud, Kitt discovers the monstrous inside the marvelous, ‘an abyss inside the abyss.’ Here is language that lies awake on the nightside of existence.

‘Has anybody flown / to holiness from a language?’ asks Tony Kitt in his remarkable new book, Endurable Infinity. An heir to the Bretonian impulse of ‘the marvelous,’ Kitt electrifies impulses both human and galactic. Sometimes socially conscious, his stunning poems avoid expected diatribes, unfolding into complexities of what could be: ‘Don’t bigfish me. / Open your Michelangelo mouth.’ He offers an uneasy wisdom (‘Loving is living your life backwards’) that simultaneously dismantles language: ‘You forgave me / for what you were going to do to me.’ Kitt asks us to undo ourselves (‘Is there a hunter fond of unhunting?’) in the reconstitution of the possible.

Words are nerves. This is abundantly evident in the language Tony Kitt has deployed to animate and accelerate a poetry of vigor, synaptic flux, and imaginative force. This is the language of chimeras, fabulous creatures and fulgent metaphors, ‘rain rivers,’ ‘spiderflowers,’ and ‘trainsnakes. . . dispatched down the veins of the impossible.’ It is the mad pain of love and desire inflicted by the very taste of existence. The blaze between neurons. The spark between words.