The Dance of No Hard Feelings

Mehr zum Buch

“Delirious! Adventure stories in the shape of poems.”—Laurie Anderson. “Bibbins . . . has the courage to stop, to pin down the always irrational present moment, and the reader is eager to follow, to inhale its scathing or enticing perfume. . . . A brilliant young poet.”—John Ashbery. "Those who will feel themselves spoken for by these poems have been hungrily awaiting this book." —Publishers Weekly, starred review. In his second collection, Lambda Award winner Mark Bibbins pressures language into a performance of surprising movements across syntax and line. Vulnerable yet sharp-witted, he responds to a nation grappling with a bankrupted presidency, employing concise lyrics and longer sequences while inventing a new form, the exploded double haiku. Incited by progressive blogs, ad campaigns, elegy, and Eros, Bibbins addresses environmental catastrophe and grotesque political posturing in our nascent millennium, as well as the corporate media's complicity in pandering to audiences drunk on doublespeak. These are songs of passion and ambivalence sung in a dark time. Wrong decisions are harder to make than most people realize, tears flying sideways in a gale. We swerve in the road to avoid dead things, but I used to know someone who did the opposite. Stars are most serious when seen from the back of a pickup truck while very drunk, and if someone kisses you there, it doesn’t count. Mark Bibbins teaches in the graduate writing prog