Books
Poetry
Norman Finkelstein’s In a Broken Star is a Wunderkammer of shining and enigmatic song-lyrics, memos and dispatches from an extra-dimensional dead letter office, and gnomic fragments of ancient wisdom texts. At its center is the astonishing narrative The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust, in which Finkelstein has reinvented the quest narrative for our own moment—whether postmodern, post-political, post-gender, or post-truth. A knight-errant (or vagrant) in “flowered Docs,” Pascal wanders in quest of—well, they’re not quite sure: origins? genealogies? foundations (immanent or architectural)? answers? Pascal traverses waste lands recalling those of Eliot, Browning, and Lovecraft, swims and flies through libraries of Alexandria and Babel, and receives tantalizing hints of destinations in colloquies with specters from beneath the sea, from eldritch dimensions and “faery lands forlorn.” Where will Pascal find the key to all mythologies: in the Zohar? the Necronomicon? the Standard Edition of Freud? And are they all finally the same book, its pages reshaping themselves beneath the (three-lobed) reading eye? Engaging, nightmarish, intensely erudite in the arcana of canonical literature, philosophy, outsider art, and pop culture, Pascal Wanderlust is one of the most electrifying adventures in contemporary poetry. —Mark Scroggins
From the Files of the Immanent Foundation is a beautiful work of hesitant wonder, coaxing stark narration, precept, adage and a strange, winsome yet doleful music out of bureaucratic and documentarian argot and protocol. Its long run of quirks and particulars makes it also a work of rash but strict invention, both an inquiry into invention and its anthem or hymn, its exemplum. Immanence’s openly secret accord with emanation seems to be at issue or at least at work. I read it wishing it would never end. —Nathaniel Mackey
Graley Herren reviews Immanent Foundation in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.
Alexander Dickow reviews Immanent Foundation in Rain Taxi.
Joshua Corey reviews Immanent Foundation in Plume.
Barbara Bermain reviews Immanent Foundation in The Rumpus.
Whether it be through the wandering verses of the Track trilogy, through mythic rewritings in earlier work such as Passing Over, or through the densely rich and philosophical offerings of Inside the Ghost Factory, Finkelstein is a poet ever reinventing what poetry might, and even must, do. With its musical precision and its intellectual rigor, with its exquisite ability to intertwine the force of the traditional lyric with the beautiful unexpected of the experimental, Finkelstein's poetry stands distinctive in our poetic landscape, proffering riches that are rare and rewarding.—Rachel Tzvia Back
From their earliest setting out, the poems of Norman Finkelstein have fetched a new Vision, not only mapping but marking the Vision with supernal inscription, the signature of Heaven as it were. And theirs is not a cold heaven. Nothing in these poems is imposed or rehearsed. What is permanently remarkable here is that the work goes forward to imagine what no American poetry has imagined before: a society of Vision. In the later poems, we actually experience the vivid--sometimes harrowing, sometimes hallowed--exchanges that truly, truly are a nation of nothing but poetry. Finkelstein has thus honored more promises than we ever dared to own. —Donald Revell
Barbara Berman reviews Ratio in The Rumpus.
Paul Pines reviews Ratio at Notre Dame Review.
Track beautifully reminds us that pain and uncertainty are "to be exchanged for music." This is a haunting "broken crown" of a poem in which language's power to name transmutes loss simultaneously into celebration and epiphany. —Michael Heller
Henry Weinfield's review of Track at Notre Dame Review.
Peter O'Leary's review of Track at The Volta.
Mark Scroggins' review of Track at Jacket.
Inside the Ghost Factory finds Norman Finkelstein returning to his pre-Track fascination with the Coleridgean fancy, first delineated in Restless Messengers. Here, however, Samuel Coleridge meets William Gibson and the result is a retro-Blakean myth for the age of Text and Tweet. These transmissions from"elsewhere," manufactured on the assembly lines of "Ghosts, Incorporated. Poetry, Incorporated" (Limited, I might add), are gleefully dissected by Finkelstein as so much "clap-trap." Still, there's no correcting the blur of occultation and occlusion for the poet who believes "Books were made for secrets they cannot/keep: this is what it means to be/read."
—Tyrone Williams
To read Scribe is to pass "through a series of gates" into the paradoxical heart of the poem, where “terror and enchantment,” the communal and the solitary, the light and the dark, the imaginings of adult and child come together in an ancient music entirely of our moment. Norman Finkelstein here articulates the permissions and responsive urgencies of poetic engagement, echoing now ballad music – or magic, now the muted voice of dailiness, now the lyric strains of desire. —Michael Palmer
The poems in Scribe are written, as the poet writing them tells us, in the voices of a "scribe turned into a scribe"… a poet who feels the shapes with which his poems are to be assembled and chanted, who composes in invented perfection the deepest recordings of the most deeply human… a scribe inscribing our most sacred truths... Scribe is a masterpiece by a master poet. —Lawrence Joseph
After the Track trilogy, one of the most brilliant and audacious works in recent American literature, what a pleasure to discover these earlier poems by Norman Finkelstein. Lyricial, probing, and always finely wrought, there is a tenderness in this book that can break one's heart. —Paul Auster
The most moving of these poems question the very conditions of speech. In these, given over to solitude, ecstasy and despair, music and the divine, Finkelstein offers, in contrast to stories which gloss the history of a people, the fate of the isolate, unstoried soul, its flights of eloquence, chastened silences....Still, it is not merely the messengers, the words, that are restless, or even he who speaks them. Restlessness itself is the never quite disclosed message to which Finkelstein's mastery of a variety of forms bears witness. —Joseph Donahue
Finkelstein's sense of language as the braid that endlessly makes and unmakes the world has led him...to reinvent...the grand Romantic ode....Finkelstein's poems achieve a rich, formal music, as the poem itself becomes a rite of worldmaking. —Burton Hatlen
Criticism
With the great intimacy and insight of a poet-scholar, Norman Finkelstein traces a late modernist genealogy of Jewish American poets as “secular rabbis” who write out of the tradition: both in the sense of being outside it and, poignantly, emerging out of it as they leave it behind. Nuanced and moving, his close readings are anchored in the poets’ own writings about poetry, taking the poets seriously as scholars of verbal art. The book is a celebration of diasporic poetics, a poetry of “wandering meaning” even when it resides, as in the case of the wonderful American-Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back, “fully in the paradox of being ever a foreigner at home.” —Chana Kronfeld
In Dark Rabbi, Norman Finkelstein provides an informative account of some contemporary Jewish poetry from the radical midrashic and antinomian to lyrics that court religiosity in the face of diaspora. For these poets, whose quarrel is as much with one another as with God, the secular is never secular just as the holy is invented with each poem. —Charles Bernstein
This is one of the best academic books I've read in some time, and one of the very best academic books on poetry that I've ever read. Finkelstein is not just a skillful reader, but a superb one. His readings--of everything from individual lines up to entire sequences--have the effect that only the best readings have, of at first glance catching you by surprise, and then, on reconsideration, convincing you of their inevitability. —Brian McHale
On Mount Vision is an excellent book, one whose value exists on the level of explanation to be sure, but more powerfully, more suggestively, on the levels of persuasion, and of myth and metaphor, where one encounters the archetypes of the poet as priest, prophet, seer, antinomian, heretic, and scholar-translator. Finkelstein provides a lucid model for how to read and understand the often difficult and quarrelsome poetry that is his subject. This book will take its place as the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets. —Peter O'Leary
Norman Finkelstein offers subtle, synoptic, and learned overviews of some experimental U.S. poets with textual-spiritual vocations. Making richly articulated career overviews of Duncan, Spicer, Palmer, Johnson, Mackey, Schwerner, and Susan Howe, Finkelstein engages with their spiritual projects,their affiliations, and their intellectual intensities. Its empathy and clarity of understanding make this book an exemplary interpretation of contemporary poetic practices. The cosmic, Gnostic, scriptural, antinomian, spiritualist, heterodox, and shamanic long poems of our time have rarely been so wellunderstood or so suggestively exfoliated. —Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Norman Finkelstein came of age under the sign of Donald Allen's New American Poetry, but he makes the Allen poets seem entirely new. Whether he is discussing the poetry of Robert Creeley or Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer or John Wieners, he probes beneath the surface and looks for the buried emotional landscape behind the "slight lyric grace." Accordingly, the poets in question emerge as profound, even spiritual beings, for whom poetry is not just one mode expression, but THE inevitable one. I found myself deeply moved by Finkelstein's readings; his take, for example, on Michael Palmer's Baudelaire Series, with its tension between transcendence and the vagaries of everyday life. His empathy and respect for a given poet's project is rare in contemporary criticism. This is a book to savor and to reread often. —Marjorie Perloff