Words nd Ends from Ez presents writing as the act of reading--in this case Mac Low's reading through of Pound's The Cantos. By applying his "diastic chance selection method" and using as an index the letters EZRA POUND to generate words and the ends of words, Mac Low re-creates Pound's text, making of it a ruin whose parts force us to imagine the missing whole, in effect MAKING IT NEW. A major work of poetic criticism, Mac Low's text will take its place alongside such classics of the genre as Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson. At the same time, Words nd Ends from Ez stands on its own as writing which stretches the sinews of language as we know and use it, mapping a world where sound intersects light and absence creates space whose meaning we have only dreamed of until now.


"Mac Low'sWords nd Ends from Ez comprises an important re-reading of a seminal American poet. Mac Low's "diastic chance selection method" is nowhere better employed than in this critical exposure of the Poundian texts it unlayers and unravels. In Pound, as in Mac Low, more will be found, and meant, than meets the will or the eye."
-- Jerome McGann


"Now in his classic phase, so to speak, albeit as much a charming newcomer as ever, Jackson Mac Low makes adamant sense and sense adamant, simply the two-way street of either system or existence--but with love, with intelligence, with all you can ever think it is."
-- Robert Creeley


"Mac Low, who is one of our truest inventors, creates new modes & brings us back to the oldest possibilities of sound & language as they enter poetry & music. An homage to a great poet by a great poet."
-- Jerome Rothenberg