Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

s] to arrange itself as we move, dreamlike, through it, encountering a singular architecture of novel and novelist that challenges us to read and think towards new possibilities, new heights.” —Arkansas International “Moschovakis is a poet, and Eleanor is unmistakably a poet’s novel, alert to the textures of experience but relaxed in the pursuit of plot.” —Lambda Literary “Moschovakis’s characters are celebrations of the information-collecting prowess of women, of the way in which her characters ‘weigh and consider’ . . . an overwhelming amount of data throughout each day.” —Rain Taxi “Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge: that moment where one ages out of youthfulness and begins to flutter in the debris of middle living, flattened out by technology, wild-goose chasing one’s data. Yet, the deeper we look into Eleanor’s unsettledness, the more we see and the more hope we find in her rhizomic wandering. This is a beautiful slow burn of a novel.” —Renee Gladman “I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that captures so deftly what it’s like to live at a time of big data and mundane precarity, where connections seem at once incredibly easy to form and incredibly difficult to maintain. With keen insight and probing humor, Anna Moschovakis vitally engages the ecosystem of art, ideas, and narratives that make up the things that we call our lives.” —Alexandra Kleeman “Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is brilliant, inventive, funny, and full of sharp, keen insights. Anna Moschovakis is one of the most invigorating invigilators of our current moment, in all of its complexity and vexatious paradox. To paraphrase its protagonist, this book is a performance that is quality life—try now!” —James Hannaham Praise for Anna Moschovakis: “Deeply engaging. . . . Moschovakis sets philosophy, etymology, and memory in motion to show that ‘There are many ways to follow a thought.’” —Publishers Weekly “Anna Moschovakis is a great abstract poet in the sense that she explores how formal procedures and found vocabularies and grammatical structures delimit what we can express at a given historical moment. But what makes her an indispensable writer is how she is able—and through her we are able—to experience questions of logical and linguistic relation as intensely lived, as sites not only of critical reflection, but of love. This book completes what I consider an essential poetic trilogy. It has expanded my sense of how I, you, they, we might address one another in the present tense of art.” —Ben Lerner “They and We Will Get into Trouble for This may have its lineage in various traditions, but if we call it avant-garde or experimental, it is to say that it provides new ways of looking at what poetry can do at this very moment, broadening our perception of what was always possible. In that sense, it is a rich and momentous book, which should establish Anna Moschovakis as one of the most important poets writing today.” —Kenyon Review “I enjoy and appreciate her philosophically bent poetry, her austere use of language, and the sense of violence that charges her poems.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian “Perhaps what is needed now is what this book supplies: beautiful and fraught complexity. . . . Philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and other realms of theory are woven throughout the book, which never creates an academic distance, but builds a path toward intimacy.” —Boston Review “It feels smart, unsettled—at times evasive, and at others so straightforward that it hurts.” —American Poet