Decay Studies U.S. Edition

Seefahrt’s poems are in fact more than poems, they instigate a

language-based laboratory, a way of being close to poiesis-in-

process, giving witness to something like private loss of energy

inside a ritual, or radioactive decay within the poetic artefact.

-Sean Borodale, author of Bee Journal and Inmates

If Strand’s famous speaker declares itself ’the absence of field, ’

Seefahrt’s insists itself, not through a preponderance of self-

reflection, but through an almost monastic attention to the

external world. Decay Studies models for us a practice of looking so

closely that edges, wounds, holes, absences, and ’nothings’ provide a

ground for full being where the ablative is a path to the good.

- Meghan Maguire Dahn, author of Domain

If to read Arthur Seefahrt’s acutely perceptive Decay Studies feels

like an act of close looking, then the inverse is no less true-the

act of looking at these poems is presented as a form of close, even

worshipful, reading. With an investigator’s exactitude, Seefahrt

pores over the objects of this world as they appear and interact in

a series of environments, almost as if to solve the mystery of their

being there, if not the mystery of being itself. Formally inventive,

scrupulously executed, and in a language that spans with ease the

intricately figurative and the profoundly mystical, Decay Studies is a

breathtaking debut, and one whose ostensible focus might be decay,

but whose achievement is decay’s opposite-preservation.

​​​​​​​​​​ -Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot and The Problem of the Many