Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem, Preface:

Could “The dead are dying of thirst” apply to the living dead wanting to awake, wanting more life, wanting more from life? An appetite for acknowledgement and the change it can bring drives andoumboulouous we.

This thirst or demand or desire sounds a sometimes dark note, a note whose not yet fulfilled promise bends it, turns it blue. A desperate accent or inflection runs through seriality’s recourse to repetition, an apprehension of limits we find ourselves up against again and again, limits we’d get beyond if we could. This qualifies the promise of advance and possibility the form otherwise proffers, the feeling for search it’s conducive to complicated by senses of constraint. Circularity, a figure for wholeness, also connotes boundedness. Recursiveness can mark a sense of deprivation, fostered by failed advance, a sense of alarm and insufficiency pacing a dark, even desperate measure, but this dark accent or inflection issues from a large appetite or even utopic appetite or, better – invoking Duke Ellington’s neologism — a blutopic appetite. Seriality’s mix of utopic ongoingness and recursive constraint is blutopic, an idealism shaped or shaded by blue, in-between foerboding, blue, dystopic apprehension of the way the world is. (xiv)