Heretical Materialism: A Pasolini Triptych by George Fragopoulos

In what often seems like an inchoate mass of subjectivity produced in the guise of poetry, the work of George Fragopoulos offers an entryway into new possibilities built upon and out of a bedrock of poetic tradition. While present approaches bypass, discard, or simply are not cognizant of great chunks of this tradition, Heretical Materialism: A Pasolini Triptych, enters into direct colloquy with voices and images of the past that feel even more essential to us now in this rendering.

— Ammiel Alcalay

Against the scaffolding of the life and work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, George Fragopoulos’s debut negotiates between the historical and the eternal, matter and spirit, aesthetics and politics, representation and the real. The poems live in the rush of particulars: the confessional and quotidian are spliced with anecdote and ephemera from a range of heretical traditions: left politics, the moral wild of the Gospels, the 20th century the avant-garde. Then there are the places: Pasolini’s Italy, the half-mythic backroads of the apostles, the Greek isles, and the poet’s native New York, with its own cataclysms of culture and economy. The voice is erudite, searching, and honest, all along holding out the hope that, for all the impossible baggage of past and present, there is always the chance of beginning again:

we run up against the immanence
of our material conditions and
the timecode turns to stars: 0:00:0.

— Brandon Kreitler

George Fragopolous’s unrelenting debut collection blazes through the distinctions between ekphrasis, lyric poetry, and hymn; exegesis and metacommentary; mournful invective and jeremiad at an eye-popping velocity. The works collected here sustain a drive animated by an effort to mirror the moving image’s rate of 24 frames per second as well as “desperate vitality,” like that in Pasolini’s eponymous poem. Displaying an astonishing “capacity for obedience”—to the essential filmmaker’s iconoclasm and devotion to centrality of poetry above all other media—Fragopolous “capacity for rebellion” seems equally endless. Here nowness prevails.

—Mónica de la Torre

George Fragopoulos is a poet, translator, and struggling novelist living in Brooklyn, NY. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Circumference, The Critical Flame, The Found Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Words Without Borders and Works and Days. Along with Joshua Wilkerson, he is the co-editor and co-founder of Beautiful Days Press, a poetry micro-press. He is an Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, CUNY and an Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

. Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-437-6