Book Review: More Fugitive than Light: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL July, 2025

More Fugitive than Light: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017

by Richard Milazzo and Daniel Rothbart

Tsukuda Island Press / Publication date July 2024 / Price: $30.00 / Paperback / 256 pages / ISBN:1-893207-50-1 // 978-1-893207-50-9

Available at Amazon.com and various other book vendors.

For a book of poetry and art, it is notable that 112 pages of heavily crammed prose proceeds the nub of More Fugitive than Light: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017: which is the quatrain poems that Richard Milazzo (noted New York art critic, curator, poet and publisher of Edgewise Press) wrote in Rome, Paris, Venice, Florence, Modena, Santa Monica and New York City during the years 2016-2017. The poems end with the city, hotel or café in which they were written. These visually evocative place poems are paired with 72 digital collage artworks by artist Daniel Rothbart, who is also the author of three books, including Seeing Naples: Reports from the Shadow of Vesuvius (Edgewise Press, 2018) and Jewish Metaphysics as Generative Principle in American Art (Ulisse e Calipso, 1994)  

Milazzo’s long essay on Rothbart starts off More Fugitive than Light, which is followed by artist/author Rothbart’s discussion of Milazzo. So the book is certainly not exactly a collaboration, but rather an analogical game of call and response.

Italy, and especially Naples, are deeply implicated here. Japan and Northern Africa are implicated here. The dazzling verbal intimidations of Wayne Koestenbaum are implicated here. Walter Benjamin and Walt Whitman and Stéphane Mallarmé are inflicted upon here.

Rothbart’s digital collages drop images of his metallic-looking bowls and odd branchy sculptures into scenic postcards from around the world. This is amusing in the way roaming gnomes are: garden gnome lawn ornaments brought on trips around the world and photographed in front of famous landmarks.

The reaching silvery forms are mostly snippets from rhizomatic (ῥίζωμα) structure: non-linier networks that connect any point to any other point. The rhizome as an epistemological model in which the organization of elements does not follow a subordination line. It was intensely articulated in the Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari book A Thousand Plateaus (1980), where it is used to refer to network flows that establish connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts and social struggles.

Rothbart’s silver sculptures are also thus biomorphic; flowing and floating forms touched with the surreal whimsy of Joan Miró. They would make fine jewelry.

But some look menacing to me, and suggest something of an 18^th century cervical dilator. Others remind me of Not Vital’s Unpleasant Object (2008) sculpture after being hit by a car, and others, slicker versions of the inventive surgical tools from David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988), where Beverly seeks out metallurgical artist Anders Wolleck and commissions a set of bizarre gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women.

But these floating mysterious metallic sculptures (as depicted in the digital images) also have the feel of Ska music to me. They skip and ramble along somewhere in the warm soul between scrupulousness and probability.

So the spirit (or sensibility) of both contributors is that of erudite travel and restlessness. As such, the book is a portrayal of figure and ground in motion, and that combination makes for perfect summertime reading within cool breezes. Somewhere else. WM