Seefahrt's poems are in fact more than poems, they instigate alanguage-based laboratory, a way of being close to poiesis-in-process, giving witness to something like private loss of energyinside a ritual, or radioactive decay within the poetic artefact. -Sean Borodale, author of Bee Journal and InmatesIf Strand's famous speaker declares itself 'the absence of field,'Seefahrt's insists itself, not through a preponderance of self-reflection, but through an almost monastic attention to theexternal world.

Decay Studies models for us a practice of looking soclosely that edges, wounds, holes, absences, and 'nothings' provide aground for full being where the ablative is a path to the good. - Meghan Maguire Dahn, author of DomainIf to read Arthur Seefahrt's acutely perceptive Decay Studies feelslike an act of close looking, then the inverse is no less true-theact of looking at these poems is presented as a form of close, evenworshipful, reading.

With an investigator's exactitude, Seefahrtpores over the objects of this world as they appear and interact ina series of environments, almost as if to solve the mystery of theirbeing there, if not the mystery of being itself. Formally inventive,scrupulously executed, and in a language that spans with ease theintricately figurative and the profoundly mystical, Decay Studies is abreathtaking debut, and one whose ostensible focus might be decay,but whose achievement is decay's opposite-preservation.

​​​​​​​​​​ -Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot and The Problem of the Many. .