Black Swan Theory

“When I read the poems in Kyle Marbut’s Black Swan Theory, I thought there was no place else I’d rather be. These poems have brought the world to you, even when they say, ‘Winter and not a world in sight.’ They have the quality of a diary or log, though ‘This is not a daybook. All I have to report on are my days, tethered to shadows tethered to sky.’ In the days that go by, memories drift alongside the never-ending present full of emotions and scenarios, which turn into a future. There are insights and torments, certainties that dissipate, and conversations with plants, animals, windows, stars, fields, loves. Day by day, there is a partial view of a plot, but most of life is the current beneath larger events, something I, and I imagine other readers, know intimately. As Marbut says, ‘I don’t know anything about myself other than this pear I’m eating.’”

—Arda Collins

“Black Swan Theory is a book of feral originality. In scenarios as vivid and odd as Ovid’s, Kyle Marbut’s prose poems offer tales of eros, abjection, and transformation through love. No scene is too strange a sensorium for this kinky and queer and visionary poet, who continually treads the line between apophatic vision and surrealist dream. If ecstasy offers a way out of oneself, and paradox offers an escape from logic, Marbut writes with abandon ‘Till the bright pours in, overflows, and I am nothing left to see.’ I’m in awe of this singular new talent.”

—Brian Teare

“Kyle Marbut's Black Swan Theory houses endless light and a gigantic material world but ‘Doom, too, is a hunger.’ And crazy things happen. A statue of a river is beheaded. Bees hive in the poet’s head. The poet doesn’t know which they want more, ‘more or less,’ yet they give us everything they have to give: their mother, their lover, their doubt, their awe, many swans and moons, many selves. Marbut doesn’t ‘mean to universe’ and anyway in this poor wealthy world, how do we ‘bear anything resembling meaning’? Still the poet can be ‘mistaken for rapture.’ And if ‘Our imaginations do not console us,’ these poems prove that sometimes they do. ‘There is always more sky’ and the poet will ‘make a comet of this yet.’ ‘If not eden, this —.’ Marbut needs and we need ‘this world for there to be another.’”

—Lesle Lewis