Where the Wanting Leads Us: Reading the Poetry of Norman Finkelstein

The essays and commentaries collected in Where the Wanting Leads Us celebrate the poetry and critical thought of Norman Finkelstein. Taken together they offer an introduction to the work of a writer who has for over forty years shaped the discourse on modern and contemporary poetics. Unmoved by the prospect of creative destruction, Finkelstein, a consummate student of Robert Duncan, stages a poetry of derivation, imbued with the deferential nuance of the weary savant. In serial poems, sounded meditations and citational inscriptions, one finds a poetics of intertextual encounter, where what awaits the reader is another reader looking back at them, with hands outstretched, commencing a séance for the spirit of enlightenment. Read more