#Funny junk scratchpad trial

Elizabeth Robinson, On Monsters (Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, 2013).

John Coletti, mum halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010).

and trans.: Peter Valente and Cole Heinowitz (Portable Labs, 2014)

Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud: 1945-1947, eds.

Tom Mandel, Partial Wave Form Some Epigrams of Palladas (self published).

Eileen Myles, Pencil Poems (Chax Press, 2011).

Norma Kassirer, The 1985 Notebook (The Buffalo Ochre Papers, 2012).

Micah Robbins, Cras s Songs of Sand & Brine (Habenicht Press, 2010).

David Brazil, Holy Ghost III & Holy Ghost IV (Compline).

George Albon, Love and Strife (self-published).

Kate Greenstreet, called (delete press, 2011).

Dana Crum, Good Friday 2000 (Avenue Press, 2014).

Dan Beachy-Quick/Srikanth Reddy, Mobius Crowns (P-Queue Books, 2008).

Brian Teare, Black Sun Crown (Fact Simile Editions, 2012).

Hugo Garcia Manriquez, Two Poems (Hooke Press, 2013).

Joe Milazzo, The Terraces (Little Red Leaves, 2012).

Todd Melicker, King & Queen (Little Red Leaves, 2012).

Eleni Stecopoulos, Daphnephoria (Compline).

He is also the author of several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Howell (Atelos Books, 2011). He is the author of five books of poetry, c.c. Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hunches, Hedges, etc.: 24-36 mini-reviews of chapbooks and books of poetry. This book is “King Corn” for the literati, a searing send-up of what and how “we” (by which I mean the privileged) in the West eat without thinking and, perhaps, vice versa. A crazy quilt of found poems (much of the book relies on public documents and records) and manipulated sources, Buffet World rattles down its monomaniacal tracks to the horizon of the “final frontier” (see “Tang Dynasty”). Every generation gets to have “the soundtrack of our lives”: “turn around/bright eyes/hello it’s me.” Every soundtrack accompanies and facilitates the reduction of differences to the shrug of indifference posing as solidarity: “hey buddy, comrade, avenue/chum, would your people like a parade//you people/would you//and you people/like to apply/for a permit/to riot…” In the latter poem, Mancini recounts his malnutritioned, gluttonous childhood as a microcosm of primitive accumulation: “I always thought of Pringles/as a luxury food.// One leaf iceberg/lettuce on white discount// Baloney melts./ Options accrue.” Ballooning to an unhealthy weight, Mancini becomes, as all advertisers desire, another Pavlovian dog: “.How many//jingles make my mouth water.” Formally, Mancini is a bricoleur he draws on and deploys “old” and New Narrative, flarf, Conceptual Writing, neo-surrealism (“Air Raid Over Fields of Bacon” may be one of the most hilarious and brutal poems in recent years) and magic realism. In the former, popular music serves as simply another mode of interpellation, commodifying pleasure as politics and memory as history (see, for baby boomers, “The Big Chill,”).

#Funny junk scratchpad trial

Certainly the two “major” poems here, “If Violence (Hey You)” and the heartbreaking autobiographical “On Behalf of the Potato Chips Industry I Would Like To Wish You A Happy Birthday,” may be read as exhibits A and B in the trial to which Mancini submits capital. Buffet World is one of those books that is “funny” but also utterly “serious.” That’s because the sublime and ridiculous, the outlandish and quotidian, are, in the world Mancini describes, two sides of the same gilded coin.

Fittingly, “Zero” is the first poem, that invented cipher which, along with one, is the foundation of computation (Alan Turing doesn’t escape Mancini’s wrath): “one/ ten/ hundred/ thousand/ million/ billion.” This ‘simple’ algorithm is an abstraction of the drive toward faster, more efficient modes of commodification (most obvious in entertainment, communication, and transportation).

Mancini demonstrates that this “modern” need/desire to engage the numerical is not that distant from religious/mystical obsessions with numerology. However, the book opens with what Mancini regards as the “source” of all mechanized and computational industries, our all too human obsession with counting and accounting without being/feeling accountable. Lurid as the rainbow-brushed, cartoonish, photographs and illustrations of meats, vegetables, and fruits, appetizers, snacks (cookies, potato chips, etc.) and “main” entrees that function like exclamation points, these hypostatized poems on the commodification and industrialism of food deliver devastating, mocking and irreverent right-left (as in boxing) combinations. Donato Mancini, Buffet World (New Star Books, 2011) 119 pp.- Like the asemic-semiotic procedures that drove Mancini’s 2007 book, Æthel, Buffet World, for different reasons, is utterly readable but almost impossible to read.