The days of anything static form, content, state are over, declares poet and translator Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics, his first collection of critical essays. Joris maps the success and limitations of contemporary avant-garde poetics, from Tristan Tzara to the most contemporary American experimental poetry, an investigation that leads him to envision a nomadic poetics as a strategy for new poetic work, for translation and, fundamentally, for an ethics of early 21st century life. Extending concepts and concerns voiced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Nomad Poetics is a daring first step in deploying the method of the rhizome, one grounded in Paul Celan s insight that Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won. With articulate immediacy, Joris s essays announce a metamorphosis of language-based art, much needed if poetry is to be of essential use in shaping the world to come."