What We Leave Behind

In What We Leave Behind, Peter Wortsman's fourth book of cut-ups, he lets the words run wild, in some cases, as in French poet Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrames (1918), letting words break ranks and dance on the page; in other cases, coupling word and image; and finally, succumbing to the lure of the visual in collages in which words play a subordinate role or disappear altogether. If, as this book's first poem maintains, "we know each other from what we leave behind," Wortsman writes, "I will hope these cut-up words and images bestir a smile or two on the face of the reader and perhaps a knowing nod."