SOURCE: Naylor, Paul. “‘Some Ecstatic Elsewhere’”: Nathaniel Mackey's Whatsaid Serif.” Callaloo 23, no. 2 (spring 2000): 592-605.

In the following essay, Naylor offers a critical overview of Mackey's Whatsaid Serif.

Nathaniel Mackey's third full-length book of poetry, Whatsaid Serif: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-35 (City Lights, 1998), is a remarkable extension of the serial poem he began in his first book, Eroding Witness (University of Illinois, 1985), and continued in his second, School of Udhra (City Lights, 1993). The growth of Mackey's serial poem in Whatsaid Serif is not merely quantitative, although it is that, since the new book adds over a hundred pages to the forty or so included in his first two books; the growth of Mackey's poem is qualitative as well. The poems in Whatsaid Serif present a thicker yet more finely textured weave of Mackey's favorite topics—culture, cosmology, music, and sex—all of which join together in an ecstatic...