Fourier Series
Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005) is a poetic fantasia set at the feverish crossroads of utopian socialist Charles Fourier, Surrealist poet André Breton, American explorers Lewis & Clark, and the inimitable John Wayne. Part pastoral, part social experiment, part fever dream, the book takes Fourier's vision of a world reorganized around passionate attraction and runs it through the landscape of American myth — meadows and crested Sierras, a glut of consumption and sex, and always the "hurt man" countering the immortality of ideal forms. Strange, expansive, and unlike anything else in the Corey catalog.
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Corey sums up this project with: "Train the horsehair liar till space manifests duration. Found this evidencery." This last bit of punning on Corey's modular method alludes to Jonathan Williams' Jargon edition of Lorine Niedecker's poems, From This Condensary. The embrace of an American pastoral in this volume is nothing if not expansive..
In his new collection Fourier Series, Joshua Corey brings history, politics, and contemporary representational practices to bear in reworking the writings of early nineteenth-century utopian thinker Charles Fourier. “Scant creatures frolic” in meadows; “crested Sierras,” “umber hills,” and desert landscapes lie under “a sky polluted with stars.” A glut of consumption and sex is displayed through a refracted and jumpy lens. Friendship and social organization appear abstracted in classical ideals, yet the figure of the “hurt man” recurs to counter the immortality of these forms. The idyll and its status as fantasy are always under threat; unpleasant intrusions spell imminent disaster for this imaginary social world and the ecology in which it exists.
—Paul Foster Johnson, "Passionate Attraction and the Critical Lyric," Jacket
