"This experimental work is not for the faint of heart, but it is
laced with meditations that will appeal to readers concerned with
poetry's role in the world."--Publishers Weekly "I am fascinated by
their attention to inequality, to questions of violence and
community: something borne out by the collaboration itself."--Bhana
Kapil's Best Books of 2013 on The Volta "An Army of Lovers explores
the liminal spaces where cities and individuals come together and
stand apart with strange, brainy grace."--Michelle Tea, author of
Mermaid in Chelsea Creek "By means of a series of stylistically and
tonally various prose segments (by turns reflexive and dialogic,
ironic and depressive, unhinged and hallucinatory, wetly emotional
and dryly wry, including a detournement of a Raymond Carver story),
the book centers, emotionally, on the ebb and flow of what it calls
'struggle-force.' Signature drone strikes, torture, ecological
collapse, environmental illness and chronic fatigue syndrome: it's
all connected." --Miranda Mellis, Rain Taxi "The book offers many
ways of approaching the age-old questions What makes something art
and What makes someone a decent citizen, as well as (if not
primarily) exploring the ways in which the answers to these
questions might intersect. More impressively, it does so without
being didactic and yet without being obscure, as so many efforts at
high-concept art tend to be."--Evan Karp, SF Weekly "Fantastical,
lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as
serious as it is absurd."--Christopher Higgs, HTMLGIANT "Authors
who co-write often produce two halves that refuse to coalesce, but
East Bay poets Juliana Spahr and David Buuck fuse with fantastic
results in this short experimental novel. It's the story of
Demented Panda and Koki, two poets united by a desire to write
politically engaged works. Wounded, bored, inspired and skeptical,
they soldier on through a landscape of toxic spills, consumer
excess, odd juxtapositions and trance states." --Georgia Rowe, San
Jose Mercury News "Authors Spahr and Buuck, who appear in this
novel as Bay Area poets 'Koki' and 'Demented Panda,' style it up
all the way from magical realism to 'new journalism' and Raymond
Carver Cathedralspeak, but it's the weary 'I can't go on. I'll go
on' optimism at which wounded veterans of the army of lovers excel.
Theirs is a rigorous book, and a book of marvels, with something
funny, something painful, stirring on every page."--Kevin Killian,
author of Spreadeagle "This picaresque story about the 'particular
lostness' of poetry, the ways poems always win and the lives of
self-described 'mediocre' poets is actually pretty hilarious! It's
also smart, incisive and politically astute. Now, to the
barricades!"--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances: Essays An
Army of Lovers begins with the story of two poets, Demented Panda
and Koki, united in their desire to write politically engaged
poetry at a time when poetry seems to have lost its ability to
effect social change. Their first project is more than a failure,
resulting in a spell that unleashes a torrent of raw sewage and
surrealistic embodiments of consumerist excess and black site
torture techniques. Subsequent chapters feature an experimental
composer (Koki?) and a performance artist (Panda?) whose bodies are
literally invaded with the ills of capitalism, manifested through
leaking blisters and other maladies, as well as a radical remix of
a Raymond Carver story, questioning "What We Talk About When We
Talk About Poetry." The novel concludes with Panda and Koki
returning to the site of their failed collaboration to conjure up a
more utopian vision of "an army of lovers." Fantastical, lyrical,
whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious
as it is absurd.
General
Imprint: |
City Lights Books
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
November 2013 |
First published: |
October 2013 |
Authors: |
David Buuck
• Juliana Spahr
|
Dimensions: |
165 x 114 x 13mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
150 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-87286-629-4 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General
|
LSN: |
0-87286-629-7 |
Barcode: |
9780872866294 |
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