Singing in the O of Not

Djelloul Marbrook

Kill me, skin whispers / to arctic bone, / I’m finished / with this disguise…

So begins the poem Blue Ampersand in Djelloul Marbrook’s tenth collection of poems, Singing in the O of Not, songs of algebraic obliteration in which our identities dissolve in the grandeur of a cosmic whole. Algebra, al jabara, means the joining in Arabic, and here the singer sings himself into divine invisibility.

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