EXCERPT The Thanatomaniac arrives from an obscure angle to address the age-old discussion on how poetry (with its enigmatic rhythms) differs from all other forms of language, while also reminding us definitively that the question ‘What Are Poets For?’ belongs neither to modern philosophy nor to contemporary literary criticism, but rather necessarily to those places where the first poets roamed the earth—the Sumerian Temple Hymns of the priestess Enheduanna, the Akkadian Flood Myths, or the Pyramid Texts of the Egyptian Old Kingdoms.…