Available soon: Demosthenes's Legacy by Jonathan Monroe

With Demosthenes’ Legacy, Jonathan Monroe creates a brilliantly elusive “poetics of asides,” a mutable linguistic field of planned accidents that evoke the uncontrollable suasions of speech. Rhetoric is estranged as “language falters through its paces.” Syntax and grammar seem selfanimated: revelatory mechanisms shimmering with slippage and wit. Idioms are torqued by difference, platitudes skew toward the strange, conventions are revamped, the metrical foot rebooted. The erotics of perception shift as ground becomes figure, and refracted surfaces illuminate the possibilities: “Nothing severed, nothing gained.” Wayward strophes riff on Demosthenes, enacting their misgivings toward oratory eloquence and arriving at rougher, gnostic stutterings “where the jewel erupts, unfolds.” Words melt into cognates and homonyms as if purposefully mumbled, improved by a mouthful of pebbles. Demosthenes’ Legacy is more adroit for such impediments, more enthralling for its resistances. These poems are infinitely rereadable, rich with the subtle and seditious possibilities of language. 
         —Alice Fulton

In Jonathan Monroe’s Demosthenes’ Legacy, the oracular orator nicknamed Demo travels a playful, intricate “path to unknowing.” Through a lifetime of rolling “word pebbles” in his mouth, as “language falters through its paces,” the quest for eloquence is transformed. In Demo’s virtual landscape, “net waves” of speech unravel and “audible suasions” conduct the reader through a “digital pluriverse” where “pronouns retain their right to grieve”. Beauty and knowledge emerge in language’s “predilection for uncertainty.” Experiencing language from within leads this Demo to a profound embrace of impermanence. 
         —Cecilia Vicuña

In this jeweled, aureate abecedary, Jonathan Monroe assembles an anachronistic account of Demosthenes’ “world beyond flesh.” What we find, delicious surprise, is a time porous with our time, aching for articulation. Clipped juxtapositions comprise each compact entry, vowels echo across the interiors, and sonic marvels are tapped to the dry-wall-stud of the prose with ringing nails. The legacy is our own. Monroe’s tensile prosody is masterful and the pleasures of the poems are exuberant. 
         —Forrest Gander

Is Demosthenes’ Legacy a translation of a real Demosthenes or his words or is it, as the impossibility of translation, fiction creating a character? Just as the word “kinesthesia” translates the sensation of movement (as if the word translates “muscle sense”), Jonathan Monroe’s fragments in Demosthenes’ Legacy are, as only immediate events, “Nobody’s narrative, no one’s dream.” The assembled fragments are Monroe’s comparison to modern media? Monroe’s playful text is a virtual “muscle sense” of the nature of event at all: “Webs released in matching threads.”
         —Leslie Scalapino

And so I asked myself: Is Deleuzean stuttering brought to bear on classicizing rhetoric? In any event, stuttering proves eloquent throughout Monroe’s writing, by providing a thoughtful way to utter a poetics. Demosthenes’ Legacy is the fine consequence of this deliberative process. 
         —Marjorie Welish