And And And is wisdom literature written for poets. Imagine if Cole Swensen was sitting on the Chokmah branch of the Kabbalah tree writing about the use and limits of language in poetry. Imagine if Solomon or Qohelet or Confucius or Jung had written about the poetic use of conjunctions, vowels, or punctuation. You’d probably get some paragraphs like this:

Thinking that every letter, rather than being built up in defiance of an edifice of silence, is actually carved out of a block of solid sound, is created by careful removal, a meticulous chiseling, a paring down with finer and finer tools—and the discarded fragments, vestiges such as the centers of os and es are repurposed to later serve as punctuations.
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The narrative tracks daily life, with its acute political and social stresses, while the constellation tracks a much wider and differently configured time, one that we never see in its entirety, but glimpse as points breaking through the sheets of darkness, giving intimations of the phoenixes, peacocks, and birds of paradise that live just behind it.
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…winds whip the seeds of grasses and other vegetation up into the air, often to extremely high altitudes, where they get embedded in clouds, from which gardens rain down, entire in their parterres. Or whole forests, seemingly at random and perfectly balanced—which is more or less the dream form of the free-verse poem.
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…alliteration and other consonant-based sound relationships stretch a text outward, ushering readers onward, through the poem and beyond, while vowel-based relationships, all forms of rhyme, off-rhyme, slant-rhyme, assonance, etc. pull the text back in on itself, thus pulling readers back into the poem, sending them swarming around it, densifying the weave, keeping them there in the heart of the piece.
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Translation, on the other hand, is nothing but play in the system; the more play in the steering, the better—the more the steering goes awry, the more territory is covered, touching on more points off the direct line of the original while yet remaining in its orbit. And the notion of orbit (thinking atomically) seems important, as it underscores the 3-dimensionality crucial to all translation.
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But, of course, the real play in any linguistic system is introduced by the readers and/or listeners—with all their various participations, from the intended to the accidental, from misunderstandings to personal associations…
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Thinking now, not about writing as shadow, but about what a writing of shadows might be—it’s such an appealing notion that it must exist. Plato’s Light is the shadow of God seems useful here in that it reinforces the notion that what casts a shadow need not itself be material. Writing as the shadow of that which cannot be said, a slight stain on the day, which darkens with light.
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Which makes one then think about shadows in language more generally. Of shadows that are cast, in an active sense, within a word. For while we might easily recognize the shadows, the echoing and layered darknesses, within certain words, particularly nouns, and particularly charged ones, such as love, or river, or memory, or flame, we need to recognize that the shadows are equally thick, equally haunting, within words such as the and and and yes.
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We tend to think of memories as personal—as the epitome of the personal, in fact, but in fact, they are not. They’re shared shadows, and the shadows share them, so no memory is ever alone. And though we hoard them to us, the us overwhelms.

There are dozens of paragraphs like this. And they are very much and self-consciously paragraphs. Somewhere between prose-poetry and essay. Very much focused on process. Each paragraph stands in isolation. If that sounds like your bag, this is a great read. If the above selections irritated you with their opacity and free association, this probably isn’t the book for you.