Seefahrt's poems are in fact more than poems, they instigate a
language-based laboratory, a way of being close to poiesis-in-
process, giving witness to something like private loss of energy
inside a ritual, or radioactive decay within the poetic artefact.
-Sean Borodale, author of Bee Journal and Inmates
If Strand's famous speaker declares itself 'the absence of field, '
Seefahrt's insists itself, not through a preponderance of self-
reflection, but through an almost monastic attention to the
external world. Decay Studies models for us a practice of looking so
closely that edges, wounds, holes, absences, and 'nothings' provide a
ground for full being where the ablative is a path to the good.
- Meghan Maguire Dahn, author of Domain
If to read Arthur Seefahrt's acutely perceptive Decay Studies feels
like an act of close looking, then the inverse is no less true-the
act of looking at these poems is presented as a form of close, even
worshipful, reading. With an investigator's exactitude, Seefahrt
pores over the objects of this world as they appear and interact in
a series of environments, almost as if to solve the mystery of their
being there, if not the mystery of being itself. Formally inventive,
scrupulously executed, and in a language that spans with ease the
intricately figurative and the profoundly mystical, Decay Studies is a
breathtaking debut, and one whose ostensible focus might be decay,
but whose achievement is decay's opposite-preservation.
-Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot and The Problem of the Many
