CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/8/2021

Jeremy Sigler's 'Goodbye Letter' is a Staff Pick for National Poetry Month

Featured spreads are from Goodbye Letter, Hunters Point Press's seriously gorgeous new collection of despairing yet playful and ultimately optimistic visual poems, appropriations and word puzzles by Jeremy Sigler. Sometimes addressing sound and language—as in phonemes and musical scores—and other times addressing writing and language—as in keyboard design and codes—Sigler's work in this book is "vintage witty [and] conceptual," in the words of poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff. Some works are deceptively emotional, like one appropriated text explaining the origin of the stethoscope, which operates as love poem (secretly dedicated to Sigler's father, a pediatrician). This is followed by a signature of perforated blank pages meant to be torn out and used to listen to the human heart. Another perforated poem ends the book with half-ironic comedy; it's a tear-out letter addressed to the National Register of Historic Places, nominating Sigler's Brooklyn apartment for landmark status, "ensuring that future readers and enthusiasts have the opportunity to observe where the poet lived, sit at the table where he wrote, recline on the daybed where he napped, and gaze out his window—to, as Sigler once said, 'stand naked in the poet's boots.'"