Poetry. From the beginning Rodrigo's poems have emerged as serious, serial shots at the dark, and in this collection the alarms are coming from all directions. Whatever is out there: it is commemorating resistance (Fanny Howe). Rodrigo Toscano's PARTISANS works the mechanics of language to unveil the conjoined agency of human labor and grammatical component. Rejecting both univocal materiality and its supporting idealistic investments, he brilliantly renews a tradition of poetics based in the structuring work of grammar that begins with Louis Zukovsky and continues in Kit Robinson's THE DOLCH STANZAS and Alan Davies' NAME. This work is an ethical disquisition 'As against / The set relations' that revises much current doxa about the nature of linguistic agency (Barrett Watten).

Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA

Rodrigo Toscano's latest books are DECK OF DEEDS (Counterpath Press, 2012) and COLLAPSIBLE POETICS THEATER (Fence Books, 2008). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, and in McSweeny's "Poets Picking Poets." He was a 2005 recipient of a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. Toscano is also the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). Toscano has worked in labor politics and environmental justice movements for over fifteen years.