Khaled Mattawa:

“A marvelous and courageous debut…As the title indicates, we are reading (or listening to) a musical composition where multiple variations on a melody are repeated and reiterated, entering and exiting in counterpoint and harmony to make a single interwoven work. The importance of the ‘fugue’ is not that we read about two parallel narratives and sensibilities and variations on them. Rather, it’s in the poet’s desire to compose a musical, or lyrical response, not a narrative one. He wants to sing, vocalize, groan, and hum…and it is the poems’ beautiful language and numerous spiritual and psychological insights that transport into meaning through engagement, self-realization, and revelation.”

“Fugue Figure mediates the portraits of self and other—depicting figures as they come into and move out of focus. Fugue here is as pictorial as it is choral, the page a site implicating shifts that unsettle and resemble. Referencing artists (often British), Green re-establishes the common ground between poetry and painting, replacing mimesis with fugue, with writing that has learned from the gestures of Bacon and Auerbach, where paint (or the word) hovers towards and away from (fuga: to flee) the figure observed. Frames hold and release their subjects: a broken self, a mother. Love and loss swap authority in a synesthetic collection that is as moving as it is daring. Our task is to recognize these fleeting glimpses of truths. Go figure.”