Poetry. "Against Suicide" is the title of one sequence in STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE but could just as easily stand for the whole. A lyric manifesto, by turns probing and furious, STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE enlarges upon the poet's brother's death in 2007. "Can you psalm / this limit-work," Pethybridge asks, echoing Zukofsky; the limit of such work-in-language, such unpronounceable grief, is, ultimately, a Nessus-garment of a text, "a shirt of beautiful / noise." In his cunningly evolving repetitions, in his provocative use of constraints, and in his adaptations of great works (from Dante's to David Bowie's), Pethybridge's STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE exemplifies every element of Theodor Adorno's assertion that the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form.

Jeffrey Pethybridge is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013). His work appears widely in journals such as Chicago Review, Volt, Poor Claudia, Best American Experimental Writing, The Iowa Review, LIT, New American Writing and others. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Director of the Summer Writing Program.

He lives in so-called Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid and their son Patrick; together they curate and host the Lord Weary's Reading Series, and edit Visible Binary. He's currently at work on a documentary project centered on the recently released torture memos entitled "Force Drift, an Essay in the Epic." He grew up in Virginia.

"In his cunningly evolving repetitions, in his provocative use of constraints, and in his adaptations of great works (from Dante's to David Bowie's), Pethybridge's Striven, The Bright Treatise exemplifies every element of Theodor Adorno's assertion that the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form. It is not a book bent upon understanding, and certainly not condoning, the choice of suicide—though Pethybridge unearths many of the societal and personal antecedents of such a choice. Rather it is a text that formally explores every interstice of the zone between the irretrievable past and ongoing present, which the grammatical form of the word 'striven' suggests (past participle, used in the perfect tenses). This is a poetry that helps us to perceive that interminable bridge between past and present in all of its terrible normalcy, a bridge that carries us to the core of our human condition." - Rusty Morrison