Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge

by Jules Boykoff

Poetry. "I've heard it said that poetry that uses the phrasal fragment can't have a coherent and strident politics. I've never believed it. But if for some reason you have, read ONCE UPON A NEOLIBERAL ROCKET BADGE and be shown the way. This collectuon makes the lyric and socialist realist documentary look helpless in the face of neoliberalism. If there is, as many want to argue now, a poetry of globalization, Jules Boykoff is writing it and those looking for what poetry might look like post-Seattle will find this necessary reading"-Juliana Spahr. "Boykoff unleashes a ribald criticality as a bald come on to liberation. Liberation shimmies. New stuff shakes out. Here's a poetic practice boldly moving beyond current centrist expreimental poetries and their obsession with betweening and thereining. Bump all that! Give us the shake out. Give us a hand"-Rodrigo Toscano.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collection, Boykoff turns the vulgar gaze of non-conceptual poetics (the practice formerly known as flarf) toward the realm of tract-peddling, sign-carrying, blow-up-the-corner-Starbucks politics. However, this play is not intended as a satire of leftist positions, but as a means of refining those stances, shedding the dross of propaganda and rigid partisan sloganeering that has dominated the national idea of what makes something "political" post 9/11, or for Boykoff post WTO riots. In this collection, the politics runs head-on into an imaginative verbal play of signifiers, and comes through, not unscathed but more sincere and introspective.

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

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