This book contains the first part of Dale Smith’s Susquehanna, a sustained meditation on the value of failed vision-particularly the inability of a young Samuel Taylor Coleridge to fully realize his Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the early 19th century. Thinking this failure through the cultural and technological developments of the present moment, Smith develops a methodological approach within the body of the poem grounded partly in Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and David Antin’s talking meditations on anthropology.
Perfect-bound with three-color letterpress wraps. Like the Wingbow Press edition of Ed Dorn’s Slinger, parts of the book were set in Caslon Old Face. Parts of the book were also set in Baskerville Old Face, Palatino Linotype, and Georgia. Interior images culled from various 18th century New England primers. Front cover image of Britain culled from John Sellers’ 1690 Hydrographia Universalis. Rear cover image from Sellers’ A New Systeme of Geography, 2nd Edition, also printed in 1690.