Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, and curator; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers. His second collection Force Drift, an essay in the epic has just been published by Tupelo Press in 2025. His writing and visual poetry appear internationally in journals such as diSonare (MX); White Wall Review (CA); Writing Utopia (UK); the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day; Chicago Review, Volt, Best American Experimental Writing, Manifold Criticism; The Iowa Review, New American Writing and others. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Co-Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2026 he’ll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year.
A letter, an essay, an archive, a blueprint, an unredacted CIA file: Force Drift exposes what we already know—the “hell-yellow glare” of American empire escapeless from the glass eye in the sky. Searing in his critique, Pethybridge’s anti-epic painstakingly documents & unredacts the machinations of “endless war,” disaster capitalism, & the continuous reduction of people into isolated, severed parts forever lost to CIA black sites. The accumulation of Force Drift architects the violent patterns of empire—the city, the event, the torture, the missing, the blur between surveillance and black sites. Force Drift is an insistent call “to be new abolitionists.”
––Andrea Abi-Karam
Somewhere in the middle of this powerful book, there is an inked hand across the page of a section called passages followed by the line: “the body tracks in history—”. A powerful summary of the brutally bare remnants Pethybridge is calling up and staying with. Here the alphabet starts with Aleph for Abu Ghraib. Force Drift has been some 15 years in the making and it responds forcefully and explosively to the accelerated symbolic and verbal incoherence of our times. Official redaction is here countered as a form of dissident poetics and Pethybridge uses it maximally in his angry, raw and demanding work, which blends landscapes of erasures, dense visual shapes, with exploded, endlessly cyclical, unfinished stories and intercepted thought-processes. A savage, somatised work.
––Caroline Bergvall
A tour-de-force epic of unleashed lyricism, Force Drift exposes—in blackout, in its layers of silence, in its winding lines, and echoing syllables—the disappeared scream at the heart of America. Jeffrey Pethybridge is one of the most imaginative, sensitive, and brilliant curators of art working today, and Force Drift is energized and alive with his dedication as a poet and researcher. Against both the brutality of 21st century U.S. imperial desire, and the feckless aesthetics of so many uncommitted poetries, Pethybridge weaves the spatial dimensions of language into cyclones; once caught in those storms hear the “ardor / disaster requires,” and, there experience “spiraling down these vowels” under a “sun shattered over sea-waves.” Finally within the hold of this astonishing book you will have to answer the Sphinx, that first monstrous interrogator. And, if you are released, Force Drift will leave you forever changed.
––J. Michael Martinez
Standing on the charnel ground, the catastrophe and human wreckage of US torture policy, Force Drift is at once lamentation, broken anatomy, archive of shadow and screams, and documentary investigation that could only be realized through poetry. Extending an internationalist lineage of poets of history from Etel Adnan to Raul Zurita, Pethybridge shows again how poetry confronts atrocity––you have to look at it––and even as the evidence gets under your “time-sensitive skin,” burns your eyes, and threatens to overload your psyche, the lyric determination that suffuses Force Drift carries you through the labyrinth of disaster. Pethybridge’s visceral “essay in the epic” is an essential document for how to be truly contemporary, and “hold the gaze in the darkness to see the light of the century” (Agamben). I so admire this vow, this voice to keep lifting the carceral curtain to see through “emergent night.” Whistleblowers unite!
–––Anne Waldman
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, novelist, essayist, hybrid writer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of literature, ritual, and performance. Her work dissolves boundaries between genres and art forms, drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
