Irresponsibility

Chris Vitiello

Chris Vitiello’s second book matches conversational language with the compositional processes of a working poet dealing with the most pressing—and most quotidian—of human problems. His uncompromixing vision may demand the reader “Put this book down and go be with other people.”

“Chris Vitiello’s Irresponsibility places itself in a secret literary tradition—a list of forbears would include Olivier Cadiot’s Art Poetic’, Emmanuel Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude, and the poems of George Oppen—whose initiates discover a thrilling buoyancy via the author’s ruthless pursuit of cognitive and emotional precision. It is the major achievement of Vitiello’s newest collection that we may discover, occasion by occasion, how such precision is a deeply communal act. The great pleasure of the book comes from its outrageous conceit: to write ambitiously while refusing to render the act of writing in any of its normative or nostalgic guises. ‘All you have to do is pay attention,’ Vitiello writes, ‘and it’s not that simple.’ Each page of this absolutely essential book is a testimony to the thrills and difficulties of such unceasing attention.” —Tony Tost

“As I see it, Chris Vitiello is writing some of the most ethical poetry of our time. Not, assuredly, in the sense of moral or justified, and even less in the sense of good; it’s rather the ethics of someone trying to fully comprehend the duplicities of poetry, perception, lyric, and the self even as he practices them. At the same time, and despite the weight of such ruminative concerns, these poems are never turgid or abstruse: their surprises properly surprise, their revealments properly reveal, and their subversions properly confuse. No, the pleasures here are pretty much as old and reliable as the rocks on the beach: a chance to travel along, a little while, with a bright mind rigorously engaged in trying to know itself.” —Brent Cunningham