Heteronomy

by Chris Nealon

Chris Nealon’s Heteronomy is built out of five long poems, including The Dial. Together they form an overlapping set of mediations on love and friendship and political life. Taking inspiration from a long poetic tradition of self-referential frame devices, Nealon wrote the poems so that each refers to the others, and each is built out of poems within poems – like late-capitalist medieval dream visions in which the poet describes writing a poem, or wishes he were writing, or finds himself startled awake. What’s the poem, and what’s the frame? It’s hard to say – and perhaps because of that, these poems find in the figure of the poet an image of embarrassing self-inflation and comic limitation. They are dedicated to everyone who’s felt that way.

Chris Nealon is the author of two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke UP, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard UP, 2011), as well as two earlier books of poems: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), and Plummet (Edge Books, 2009). He teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Washington, DC.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love chris nealon. i do have a bone to pick with this strand of leftist poetics that distorts form while continuously thinking of it, bemoans contemporary culture while adhering to it, and valorizes community/communal living while only making reference to, at this point, a traceable network of marxist poets. my problem isn't even this kind of dichotomy; i think these are the contradictions we all live with. & it's not even the enclosed circle--i too wd die for my friends. but it is funny how i can tell that juliana here is juliana spahr and joshua is joshua clover. & it creates this eerie sense of inside jokes & references from which one is continuously excluded for pretty material reasons sold back to one in an aestheticized form/poetics. an aesthetics of partial-visibility that i feel we can move past for more exciting frontiers... ah well, there are parts here that i find kinda bonkers but ALSO nealon is so special bc he is sooo faggy (<3) & unlike some others in this sphere has an amazing sense of humor. felt this one ! let's go dancing