In the archives offers a lyrically rich, emotionally compelling cycle of poems that explores the alienation and longing we feel as we face the increased mechanization and frightening militarization of our present moment. In these formally inventive poems, Arigo demonstrates how each phrase can keep the reader alive to the reading experience as this writer explores and exposes a poetics of intimate as well as expansive vision. As the titles of many of the poem cycles suggest – “Abbreviated Inventories,” “Catalogued evidence,” “Tracking sites,” to name a few -- Arigo is interested in discerning how we organize our understanding of the world we live in, and how that understanding impacts our lives. These poems are astute listening devices, catching the moments “when songs and lightning suspend / present tenses.”

Praise for In the archives

“By sheer chance, I first read Christopher Arigo’s In the archives on 9/11 2006, and the poems gave me a true shock of recognition. In their spareness, their ellipses, their subtle obliquities, Arigo’s obdurate lyrics give us the ‘real’ war mood behind the docudramas of our moment. ‘It rains / and sickly blue water submits to its dendritic course / möbius in its serpentine bends and elbows/ aquatic displacement fills / with fish-dreams and few far-seeing eyes.’ In ‘Catalogued Evidence,’ one of Arigo’s best sections, the poet admits, ‘This is not the world I requested.’ Rather—and sadly—‘the obdurate distance/ between each disorients each.’ Arigo’s understated and daring poems tell it like it is—and how it will be. A superb book!”
-- Marjorie Perloff

“What I know is mostly mosaic—more missing than there,” Christopher Arigo writes. The “tactile experiments” of In the Archives interrogate the difference between plunder and discovery, looking for “the startling realness of some firm ground.” In their lyrical fracture they ask what it is to know. To be wordless is to be worldless, but “These [words] are imperfect catalogues for this world.” Arigo’s poems seek out “what is hidden in the archives”—also known as the truth. It’s an exhilarating search.
--Reginald Shepherd

A haunting requiem to the contemporary moment, Christopher Arigo's In the archives uncovers the dark underbelly of meaning's proliferation. No enthusiast of the material, Arigo's serial poems mediate a world whose systems of knowledge have turned the temporal into a machine. If, in "Abbreviated inventories 1," a reconfigured Icarus has become a military helicopter, and in "Abbreviated Inventories IV" a 21st century Moses has "among rushes and horsetails...linked the "present tense to fear/to terror-/ize..." hold on, even your breath, projective as it may be sustains itself "...without your permission." ("Breath Variants") An aficionado of a disembodied lyric, Arigo's poems place the reader both at and in the gun's scope. In the archives is one prophetic and troubling ride! A must read!
--Claudia Keelan.