A missing treasure from one of the great ages of American experimental literature, A BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY is an epic, durational, multiform text composed from 1973 to 1981. Bridging the wild conceptual experimentalism of the 1960s with the freeform, devastating ‘point perspective lyric’ that remains Coolidge’s operative method today, A BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY is a musical performance, an epic saga, and a rewriting of the nodes of grammar and meaning, exhibiting forceful transformation in every paragraph, every stanza, every turn.
