An Army of Lovers

by Juliana Spahr, David Buuck

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 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 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 EssaysAn 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.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, ebook

First published September 20, 2013

About the author

Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.

Both Spahr's critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr's commitment to fostering a "value of reading" as a communal, democratic, open process. Her work therefore "distinguishes itself because she writes poems for which her critical work calls." In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lemar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has muscle, sex and honesty. The prose is poetic throughout, Spahn and Buuk are two of our current times’ Kerouac, O’Hara and Whitman. They deal with Abu Ghraib, social media, the feeling complicity in the crimes of our elected representatives, always keeping the physical body experience involved. I needed this book.
“All the while she wondered how a digital sample cut and pasted into a sound piece but somehow capture all that she was now seeing, thinking, feeling, all its implications for her art, her desire for some right action in the world outside her computer, her recording and mixing machines, her office, her own isolated life.”

[Zoe]

well thanks nao for recommending this one.....they enticed me to it when they said there were blurbs from michelle tea and kevin killian on the back so then i ran to the library and thankfully mudd had it. yet another #smallbookthatcouldfitinapocket adventure! it really is just a great size - more compact and dense feeling than even toaf. anyway, this is the kind of book that makes me grit my teeth with joy, identification, craving, and revolutionary fervor, for a few reasons.

first of all, i almost feel cheated because like they stole my bit...gross fluids revolution place-based writing theory communal writing oozing bits strange body protrusions that are linked to capitalism bay area weird places magical realism bodies merging with animals....it's like kevin killian (for gossip and silly voice) but ecologically informed plus with a more incisive indictment of capitalism and exploration of the interlinkages of organizing and writing. oh yeah that was also a good part i liked how they were dissecting those sorts of questions, and what ""political writing"" even means...makes me think of this thing sam cohen said once about writing being a way to portray multiple viewpoints on a topic, and the story in this book that is a conversation between poets about ""political writing"" did just that in such a juicyfun way. but that's the scary part bc it's like how/why did juliana and david unearth the intimate parts of my brain in this way.

oh it was also making me grit my teeth with love and jealousy for the writing happening in the bay area in the wake of/around/within the new narrative movement - clearly these guys are so in there and it makes me so joyous to see the way these voices and modes of writing are bouncing around so many people's works.

the last part that really had me gritting was the fact that this is a collectively written book....but likeTELL ME MORE! i feel like this was not excavated enough. this book is so clearly about writing in community/alongisde friends and i was soooo interested in hearing more about the nuances of what that actual collaboration looks like (....beyond the weird rituals....). ofc koki and demented panda (the characters in first and last stories lol) embody these themes but i was craving to know more abt what collaborative writing looks like in practice for them/the authors.

&....i will admit that some moments did feel a bit overdone but i think that's the point - excess, decadence, feeling, oozing, gushing......yes

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Het laatste hoofdstuk en dat over what we talk about when we talk about poetry zijn geniaal.

[Patty Gone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant mediation on and around the question: 'How does one justify making art / writing poetry if it doesn't 'change' anything?' Includes a clever Raymond Carver appropriation, & stick around til the end: the last 15 pages are a continuously surprising poem/rant. Calls to mind Whitman, & Beckett's "I can't go on. I go on," but with unmatched 21st century awareness.

[Kidd Death · Rating 1 out of 5]

An Army of Lovers
A Legion of Lasciviousity
A Garrison of Fuck Bois
A Phalanx of Thots
A Calvary of Crèches

A prose book about being a white poet in San Francisco without trying to be like, one of those white poets in San Francisco. Couldn’t really say much for this one. Its artsy anti-capitalist bent is theoretically right up my alley but in practice I couldn’t find much to take hold of. There was a chapter “what we talk about when we talk about poetry” all about the failure of art to change the world and the frustration of one’s creative efforts finding no purchase in the real world. It’s a profound topic for someone just starting creative writing. Otherwise, it’s generally understood that just because writing something down doesn’t magically make it come true, doesn’t mean that writing has no purpose. Political problems require political solutions—mass action, popular organizing, the mobilization of more than just one person and their lovely, unique, exquisite soul to overwhelm the levies of power. The book is anarchist in a way unbecoming of most anarchists I know. When one’s notion of liberation is rooted in the actions of the individual, a personal freedom from structural forces, this comes with the paradoxically disempowering move of isolating acts of resistance to one’s personal expression, dissipating rage completely into the prosaic, harmless channels of art. This is a book that strenuously proves this lesson without processing it.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Not a boardroom but a bunker, dug into the wet and muddy ground. Not a bunker but a book, each line redacted except for the numbers. Not a book but a bonfire made from its burning pages, with untold revelers dancing around it. Not a bonfire but a set of bright stage lights, illuminating the small plot of land so that the audience could better see the action. Except that there’s no audience, since all this was happening now and everyone was knee-deep in it, not just watching but as embedded participants. Even pointing and gaping was participation. Even taking cellphone photos for documentation was participation. Even standing perfectly still and doing nothing was participation."

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful look at the role poetry can and can't play in our lives through the surrogates of two performance artists. And while it doesn't a good job exploring the disconnect between effective political action and art, there are no breakthroughs, which is perhaps telling. However, there isn't a white flag either, which is also telling.

[Jared Levine · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first I bobbed my head, as they created these wonderfully cooky characters (based on themselves), and at the way they reflected on the state of poetry (which was really spot on), but as I read on, and it got weird--like really weird--I was bursting out in laughter like a goddamn chimp while taking the public transit! They use a lot of well chosen conventions of poetry and prose narrative and the result is a perfect read for me. It's self reflexive and kinda kitschy which really worked. It's a little bit avant garde maybe, and at times uses incantations that made me crinkle my nose and nod along while reading.

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Let's clear the fields of all that hinders and hounds us, declare all contracts made in our name but without our consent null and void, and then charter illicit transport for all those who crave elsewhere and otherwise."

[Susanne Christensen]

Luvvly, what a basterd.

[Carrie]

I like the part when the light thins in the room and nobody gets up to turn on the light.

[Janey · Rating 3 out of 5]

oooh SUCH a strange and compelling read...

[Mills College Library]

Fiction S7332a 2013