As Auden famously said, "poetry does nothing." It is a genre of failure, and as such poetry is rich with failure.Book of Knots, a new book-length long poem by Canadian poet and academic Jay Gamble, seeks to engage with life's failure, by building 'a nothing' out of something, where formal innovation, including exhaustive "single sentence" pieces, noun-less poems, interruption, computerized homolinguistic translation, and procedural poems, all contribute to a Mobius ouroboros self-consuming trajectory of impossibility.Think of Book of Knots as a kind of Seinfeld of poetry: at its centre is nothing, and its playful approach to critical negation results in puzzles and riddles that may yield no answers, but are richer from the asking.
