Synopses & Reviews
"Fierce intelligence, fierce understanding of social issues, and fierce sense of the power of artifice. This is major work, haunted by a sense of totality always present in the formal intricacy and in the roles cities and architecture play. I think of these poems as crossing the cool, allusive intricacy of Quentin Tarantino with the abstract, intense social passion of Walter Benjamin."Charles Altieri, author of
The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After"The Totality for Kids is a stunning collection that charts the 'the modern and its endnotes,' as voiced in one Clover poem. There is no conceptual abstraction here without its color, motion, and syntax. The poems form an urban and linguistic landscape of contemporary life, in many ways, written in the shadow of Adorno who himself wrote in the shadows of the modern. In this brilliant volume, the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness. We encounter here an enormous clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries our historical moment in and as form."Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence
Synopsis
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 books 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 moderns excess of significationas if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.
About the Author
Joshua Clover is the author of The Matrix (2005) and Madonna anno domini (1997). He is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis, and contributes to the Village Voice and The New York Times.
Table of 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)
Blues 1900
The Other Atelier
Aeon Flux: June
Auteur Theory
Antwerp rainy all churches still haunted
OMA
A-Shaped Gate
Rue des Blancs Manteaux
In Jaufré Rudels Song
No More Boffins
Chreia
Letters and Sodas
French Narratives
Ça 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 Boys Own Story
Return to Rue des Blancs Manteaux
Whiteread Walk
Their Ambiguity
Whiteread Walk
For the Little Soldier
Late Style
Year Zero
Whats American About American Poetry
At the Atelier Teleology
Acknowledgments
Index