Vitreous Hide

Willing the word to become flesh, the poems in Vitreous Hide both reveal and enact yearning—for love, for the beloved, for the words to transform beloved image to beloved substance. Orpheus reaches for Narcissus through a new mirror of myth, now dim with distance, now bright with the possibility of connection. Through the shining skin or surface of prose lines and field composition, these poems reach for the embodiment of the other in order to be, themselves, embodied. ----------- "In a theater of the page permeated by sonic play, Edgerton shuffles together elements and impressions of the Orpheus myth, splicing them together with other aspects of the Greek pantheon, augmented with cameo appearances by Cocteau, Heidegger, Madame Bovary, and a few essential others. True to the Orphic agenda, sound, made overtly and gorgeously lyric, becomes the dominant character, increasingly swept up into a dynamically choreographed typography. It’s a book of big ideas and big feeling, yet carried so lightly on its lyric weave that it becomes almost weightless. A real delight for both ear and mind." —Cole Swensen ------------------ "Edgerton is brilliant to announce that myth and the perils of myth are flesh of our flesh, the perdurable instance of our human birth. Vitreous Hide details the dream of that birth and all the loves that keep the dream alive. These poems are the very soul of tenderness." —Donald Revell ---------------- "Others will speak of Edgerton’s brilliant use of forms and the dense musical structure that animates the poems of Vitreous Hide, and still others will be clucking their heads at the strange title, which reconstitutes in sound the brutal and the breathy, the upper and lower limits of his speech. But I want to put in a word for the gay erotics of this work, which seem to me to have no equivalent in modern American poetry. Really you’d have to go back in time and cross many seas, you’d have to flutter into Cavafy’s bedroom on a warm summer night, in that room above the cafe, the dark room with the many lighted candles, to hear so persuasive, alert, and stunning a love poem." —Kevin Killian ----------------------