From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (Vol. 1-5) Box Set

Praise:

‘Nathaniel Mackey's new box set is a fever dream of rhythm. It's the pitch perfect concert on the page that you'd never want to leave.’ —Roger Robinson

‘A radical and compelling work of praise to the music which shaped us.’ —Anthony Joseph

‘From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate is an open school curriculum, a theatre of investigation, and a book of common prayer. Nathaniel Mackey – by way of N, his variable, and their angelic, syncopic, all but silent counterpart and counterpoint – make music of music with music. For forty years this writing has kept me company. All I do is try to accompany it, in turn. You, too, will be left irreparably and rapturously unalone.’ —Fred Moten

‘Our greatest living epic poet... Mackey’s poetry and criticism... have reinvented modernism for our time.’ —LitHub

‘Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist... What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page... [His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate.’ —BOMB Magazine

‘Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit.’ —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post

‘It feels, sentence to sentence and page to page, like a work in the act of being created. It is not simply writing about jazz... There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. He is the Balanchine of the architecture dance.’ —David Hajdu, The New York Times

‘Truly, Mackey's novel is a smoking mirror. You gaze into it and you see/hear world night, sorcery sky, bass 'n drums, an improv tempest of rising sax and low beat. He summons N from the underground. A musician shaman palabrero plucking sound-cinema-words from the air for the Angel of Dust listening in silence beyond the absolutes of place.  Something happens in the reader's body-soul: a demiurgic rumble. A rhythm possession of exquisite imperfection, rampant alliteration, and sonic atmospheres countering the atmosphere of violence in the lands of our childhood. Next, oceans of possibility.’ —Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

‘From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate isn't only expansive in its form and language, but in its very approach to the senses. It requires us to become attentive to sound and breath, how it moves across the page into our bodies as we read. This is a novel that must also be read as poetry and felt as music, one which is transformative in every sense of the word.’ —Jessica Widner

‘Mackey isn’t simply playing the part of a poet recounting jazz, he’s fully engaged in the creation of its written iteration, his script a study of rhythm, flow, freedom and, yes, discipline, his words as expressive and imaginative as Coltrane’s or Coleman’s most deviously-conceived notes.’ —Spencer Grady, Jazzwise

‘Instead of accepting the casual clichés which plague musical writing, Mackey adapts a set of stylistics which are uniquely his own: much like those breaths which are prodigiously pushed out of a tenor, a trumpet, or an oboe, the words read as chaotic, harmonious, suspensions of the spirit which one must hear before they may fully inhabit.’ —Bennet S. Johnson, Literati Bookstore

‘Singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel.’ —John Madera, Big Other

‘A literary adventure of the highest order, a feat of prose and imagination that takes the fiction genre into new territory. One of the most memorable meetings of prose and jazz in English literature.’ —Florence Wetzel, All About Jazz

‘A poetic lift... wild, free-wheeling spirit...’ —Kirkus

‘From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate asks writing to answer to other registers: interval, undertone, phrase, refrain. Composed as a sequence of letters, the book turns to jazz performance, rehearsal, and practice as method, where saying is inseparable from sounding. Each sentence, each paragraph becomes an instrument, carrying sense past statement into inflection and return. Here, language holds resonance the way sound holds breath.’ —Paul Rekret