"A Complex Sentence is an important book in more than one understanding. It is important in its gather from the range of comprehensions and tentative elusions that comprise Marjorie Welish's considerable range of work. It is important in that it stands out as seminal in a context of the large number of contemporary poetry book publications. This has come about from the joyful complexity of an artist with visual acuity and constructivist practice in tow with an exact sense of word choice and recurrence. It is a book of poetry that stands out in its range of attentions to different modes of construction and cohesive in its interconnectivity between each construction, between stanzas between different poems between different visual presentations. There is a clarity in the book's musicality and a disruption of clarity in its sensitive juxtapositions. This is Welish at her best and most powerful moments, at moments of loss and gain, at moments of assuredness and in fleets of frailty." --Allen Fisher

"A key imperative in Marjorie Welish's superb new book, A Complex Sentence, is the task of 'not writing the unsaid, ' which presumably would mean to write the sayable in the folds of a complex sentence that erases it. Literary spirit guides come along to help--Mallarmé, Baudelaire, James, Pound, and critics who read them. There may be a ghostly revision of Pound's imagism, 'a complex in an instant of time, ' but instead of le mot juste, we have le mot détourné, diverted as it enters into new semiotic fields and explodes. A Complex Sentence is, in addition, a meditation on the book--its materiality (pages, margins, indexes, parchment, epigraphs, sentences)--and its cultural role as a document. Welish's sentences are complex, grammatically and narratively; they break the spine, as it were, of the book's monumentality. In the interstices of writing and saying lies the supplement to meaning, what we read between the lines or what the lines--center margined or flush left--arrange as a new structure of understanding. This is a wild and compelling book." --Michael Davidson

"In 'Pervasive Spacing, ' one of several key signature (as in a musical composition and guide to binding pages) poems in A Complex Sentence, Marjorie Welish pauses her restless pencil (instrument of inscription and erasure) to assert this axiomatic one-liner: 'Scale: she was larger than the room in which she found herself.' So too Welish, a practitioner of conceptual writing long before the phrase entered the zeitgeist of contemporary American poetry. Her procedural writing, à la Mac Low et al., exceeds normative critical and poetic categories. A Complex Sentence is the latest instantiation of Welish's relentless pursuit and demonstration of her deliberate, delimited, and far-reaching conceptual imagination. More forcefully than ever before, she subjects found and 'original' texts to a panoply of formal constraints. Roaming across the vistas of Western writing--Cicero, Epictetus, Edmund Burke, William Strode, Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, William Carlos Williams, and Nathaniel Mackey all make cameo appearances--Welish cuts and pastes texts into frames of intertextuality, disseminating critical glosses, free-floating quotations, and judgments that, though grounded in a commitment to the primacy of aesthetics, are unafraid of political, social, and cultural affirmations and rebuttals. Welish's wide-ranging metapoems excavate the generativ