Atet A.D. is the third volume of Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing epistolary
fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like
the first two volumes, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus's Run,
this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a
founding member of a band formerly known as the Mystic Horn Society.
The letters in Atet A.D. span a seven-month period beginning shortly
after Thelonious Monk's death and culminating in the band recording
their first album on John Coltrane's birthday. Rendered in N.'s
distinctive mix of discursive registers, they chronicle and meditate
upon, among other events, Penguin's return from seclusion, N.'s
recurring cowrie shell attacks, the band's adoption of a new name, and
their being beset, beginning with a gig in Seattle, by a new, perplexing
twist in their expressive powers.
As with all of Mackey's prose fiction, his hermeneutic speculations are
advanced as much by the power of puns as by syllogistic reasoning. For
all the wordplay, Mackey manages to cover a lot of ground in this
neo-novel, which is not so much about characters as it is about ideas
and themes like gender equality, the survival of African customs and
spiritual values in America, and the play of dreams within our waking
realities. Most idiosyncratically, Mackey, with his nuanced knowledge of
jazz, convinces the reader that music operates like a language, with all
the power to convey, say, a specific feminist critique of male-centered
jazz culture, or to acquire levels of symbolism that would make Dante
wonder if he should have taken up sax.--Publishers Weekly
Atet A.D. is a fascinating work of poetic/musical fiction-storytelling
that plays with, and is inspired by, language and the mystical concepts
and connections that arise unbidden from the manipulation of metaphor
and meaning, while simultaneously fueled by the sounds and energy of
American jazz which Mackey views as a source of spiritual and sexual
discipline and discovery.--Art Lange, Pulse
Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the
author of School of Udhra and Whatsaid Serif, both also published by
City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in
2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's
Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry
workshop at Duke University.
