Viva Miscegenation

by Brian Kim Stefans

Overview

Poetry. "65.3% urbanity, neoclassical wit, critical detachment, epigrams, and sestinas; 34.7% curses, farts, and terrible jokes. Like modernist poetry, but with adulterations. I am in awe of the range of styles, the wealth of invention. The title is true: this is a living book."—Aaron Kunin

"These poems are about as much furious thunder (lightning's or gunpowder's) as the lyric can carry now, well into the 21st century. Ranging, ambitious, messy here, elegant there—they sprawl with winning abandon like poetry's equivalent to a Franzen novel, sacrificing no wit but also no genuine gravitas. Look, they seem to say, at what poetry could do!"—Susan Wheeler

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780981596259
Publisher:	Make Now Press
Publication date:	02/28/2013
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Brian Kim Stefans teaches literature and new media studies at UCLA. His current projects include a theory of digital textuality based on his series Third Hand Plays written for the SFMoma blog, a tentative foray into Speculative Realist poetics, a historical anthology of Los Angeles poetry and Scavenged Luxury, an online "freeware" anthology of Los Angeles post-punk from roughly 1977-87. He lives in Hollywood.

Editorial Reviews

Stefans has long enjoyed attention in what might still be called the avant-garde, for his harsh, satirical collage-like verse and for his writings about poetry and new media. This first full-length collection since Stefans’s move from New York to UCLA will renew that attention, and ought to expand it: it’s funnier, stranger and more open than his works so far. Stefans arranges this big collection as if it were a set of chapbooks, with the first section, full of sestinas and sonnets, mocking and reinventing traditional forms: “Pastiche, pretense, parody/ are volleyed back and forth/ silently,” Stefans explains, envisioning readers “buried under the sand in your own inscrutable consequence.” At once sarcastic and friendly, cosmopolitan and capable of surprise, Stefans’s manner recalls Australia’s postmodern master John Tranter, or the English radical poet John Wilkinson. Later segments, at their best, consider Stefans’s move to Los Angeles, “blessed/ by the striations/ of traffic,” where “Practiced avoidance lacks the air of discipline,” or pay coded, punning tributes to institutions (such as the Believer magazine), to frenemies and friends. Less successful pages (including the concluding absurdist playlet) take their cues from the movement called Flarf, in which kitsch, awkwardness, even toilet humor constitute a tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism: “I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,/ it was getting kind of crazy.” Yet there are emotions behind these strange works, too, from fear of commitment to anxiety over nihilism. (May)

Publishers Weekly