"What We Leave Behind" by Peter Wortsman

In What We Leave Behind, Peter Wortsman’s fourth book of cut-ups, he lets the words run wild, in some cases, as in French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrames (1918), letting words break ranks and dance on the page; in other cases, coupling word and image; and finally, succumbing to the lure of the visual in collages in which words play a subordinate role or disappear altogether. If, as this book’s first poem maintains, “we know each other from what we leave behind,” Wortsman writes, “I will hope these cut-up words and images bestir a smile or two on the face of the reader and perhaps a knowing nod.”

What We Leave Behind, Peter Wortsman’s fourth collection of cut-up poems and collage, gives us life’s crunch and its tender middle rendered from the perspective of a man, late in life, walking the crumbling edge of the abyss. Wortsman’s distinctive collagial approach to turning cut-up elements into sharply crafted emotionally telling poems, striking examples of collage, and their caring collective arrangement, is nuanced, heartful, and effective. In contrast to the strictly reductive practice of erasure, or the random generation of content preferred by Cage and Burroughs, Wortsman, through cooperative arrangement of his extracted materials and their harmonization into a complex and rewarding unified whole, has produced a sensitive, revealing, and deeply moving body of work. What We Leave Behind, like the found art on its cover, sings sweetly beyond its humble origins, and gently opens our eyes to the beauty to be found, and that to be made, from the traces of things past.

—Marc Zegans is the author of Lyon Street, and with Tsar Fedorsky, Ghost Book

Peter Wortsman’s What We Leave Behind turns the scraps of daily life -- overheard lines, torn subway posters, and fleeting thoughts -- into vivid poems and collages. With wit, curiosity, and a scavenger’s eye, he transforms the discarded into something strange, tender, and unforgettable. This is language rescued, reassembled, and set humming again.

—Richard Modiano, Director Emeritus Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center

Peter Wortsman

Peter Wortsman (photo by Jean-Luc Fievert)
Author of work in multiple modes, including fiction, plays, poetry, and translation from the German, most recently Odd Birds & Fat Cats, An Urban Bestiary, created in collaboration with his daughter, artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, short listed for an Eric Hoffer Book Award, Peter Wortsman was a fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson Foundations (1974), and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010). His work has garnered a Beard’s Fund Short Story (1985) Award and an Independent Publishers Book Award (2014), among other honors.