The Limits of Fabrication

"The Limits of Fabrication brings an essential argument to discussions concerning the end of art. Where Hegel affirms that poetry accomplishes the dematerialization of aesthetic expression by reducing it to linguistic transparency, Brown on the contrary demonstrates that a poem is always a factory, where meaning is fashioned, even if invisibly, through the crystals, quanta, or nanotubes of language. No metaphorical abstraction in this, but the revelation of the elementary technology at work in words. A strikingly singular, beautiful, and important book." -- -Catherine Malabou author of The New Wounded "Poems are material things. From that simple observation, Nathan Brown teases out startling sequellae: experimental poetry is materials research, and materials science - in its concern with form and organization - is a branch of poetics. In the language of materials science, Brown's synthesis - of poetry, philosophy, and nanotechnology - is imaginative, while his characterizations are rigorous and enlightening." -- -Cyrus Mody Rice University "In this ambitious and exciting book, Nathan Brown aligns two practices that occur at the limits of fabrication: one, at play in scenes of reading and writing, involves the poet's ability to structure language mark by mark; the other, at play in materials research and manufacture, involves the nanoscientist's ability to manipulate matter atom by atom. These forms of making open an understanding of the methods, techniques, and procedures that structure the world we now inhabit. Unfolding across five carefully sequenced chapters, the book concludes with a brilliant reading of Mad Science in Imperial City, a volume of poems by the engineer and poet who provides Brown's epigraph and sets the scale for his important expansion of materialist poetics. 'Work nano,' Shanxing Wang urges, 'think cosmologic.' The Limits of Fabrication shows us how such a feat might be accomplished." -- -Adalaide Morris The University of Iowa