Composed between 2009- 2012, Thom Donovan’s WITHDRAWN engages a social and political landscape through a densely speculative and intertextual lyricism. Proceeding through dedication and interlocution, the poems are ones of encounter (with art works, with specific individuals and communities, with social configurations and political events) where friendship, sociality, and politics interarticulate one another. Not unlike Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry in relation to the Paris Commune of 1871, the poems in the second half of the book write through the Occupy movement, resulting not so much in `Occupoems’ as meditations on a collective enunciation in the midst of its emergence. These poems might be said to be “meta-political” (or “meta- social”) inasmuch as they are reflections on the potential for (as well as the failure of) sociopolitical subjects to come into being. Through the proper name, others are calle d into urgent relation, an expression of both the actual (the world as it is) and the prefigural (the world as one would want it to be). In its non-discursive proclivities, poetry withdraws from meaning, taking flight into prosody (stress, sonority, noise) to record a politics without a proper locus—anterior, preposterous, post-expectant.
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