Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Poetics. "The wild is always unprecedented, but never inconsistent. This is the knowledge that makesAmerican scholarship American. Norman Finkelstein offers unprecedented insights here whose factsconsist of one Soul purpose: Friendship. Here the imagination of poetry is Friendship on the line. Anddriving that line are energies of the inevitable (if we are to live, Friendship is inevitable): motions outward;an outstretched hand; a goddamn big car bought and paid for lovingly. These energies speak simply, anddoing so, they accomplish new simplicities which Finkelstein boldly proposes as the most radical virtuesof poetic art. Read and see"--from the introduction by Donald Revell.

Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1954. He received his B.A. from Binghamton University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has lived since 1980. His books of poetry include Restless Messengers (Georgia, 1992), PASSING OVER (Marsh Hawk, 2007), and the three-volume serial poem Track: Track (Spuyten Duyvil, 1999), Columns (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), and POWERS: TRACK VOLUME THREE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). He has also written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry, and about Jewish literature. His books of criticism include Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (SUNY, 2002) and Lyrical Interference: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2004). On Mt. Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2010.