Full Description
The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between "the brutal red dream/Of the collective" and "the parade/Of the ideal citizen." The book's action takes place in these gaps, "dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream." The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern's excess of signification--as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.
Contents
Ceriserie Poem (We always send it to the wrong address) Early Style "Alas, that is the name of our town; I have been concealing it all this time" Baroque Parable Poem (i come across the paving stones) Blue's 1900 The Other Atelier Aeon Flux: June Auteur Theory Antwerp rainy all churches still haunted OMA A-Shaped Gate Rue des Blancs Manteaux In Jaufre Rudel's Song No More Boffins Chreia Letters and Sodas French Narratives Ca ira Kantine Poem (We are bored in the city) The Dark Ages En Abyme "An archive of confessions, a genealogy of confessions" "Of the city of the dark ..." Poem (Tired of people, I wanted the mail to come) Valiant En Abyme Feral floats the form in heaven and of light Parable Lestrange Poem (So I went out into the nervous system of the air) Aporia A Boy's Own Story Return to Rue des Blancs Manteaux Whiteread Walk Their Ambiguity Whiteread Walk For the Little Soldier Late Style Year Zero What's American About American Poetry At the Atelier Teleology Acknowledgments Index
