Quipu

In Quipu, Arthur Sze’s eighth book of poetry, he writes with imaginative rigor and urgency poems that move across cultures and time, from elegy to ode, to find a precarious splendor. “Quipu” was a tactile recording device for the pre-literate Inca, an assemblage of colored knots on cords. Sze utilizes quipu as a central metaphor, knotting and stringing luminous poems that each have an essential place and integrity, each contributing to the recurrent “knotting” in the book. Sze’s language is taut and startling, and what appears stable may actually be volatile. In Quipu, Sze harnesses the particulars of our lives and spins them into something enduring. He makes us envision the terrors and marvels of our contemporary world in this collection of crucial poems of our time.