[––––––––]

by Rob Halpern

Winner
Herald Scotland Books of the Year

The poems included in this volume are drawn from Rob Halpern’s four collections and two chapbooks— Common Place ,  Disaster Suites ,  Imaginary Politics ,  Music for Porn ,  Rumored Place , and  Weak Link —one long writing project for which [ –——–– ] stands here in lieu of a proper title. The writing collected under the sign of this placeholder expresses the most painful desires whose explicit objects are the figures of the wounded U.S. soldier and the Guantanamo detainee. It’s in these wrecked bodies that Halpern seeks the possibility of a truly unconditional love, at once prohibited and revolutionary.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Poet, translator, and essayist Rob Halpern earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of the poetry collections Rumored Place (2004), which was nominated for the California Book Award; Disaster Suites (2009); Music for Porn (2012); Common Place (2015); and [————]Placeholder (2015). He co-wrote the book-length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (2011) with Taylor Brady. In his work, Halpern explores the intersections of lyric tradition, with its prizing of voice and individual subjectivity, and social crises, including the conditions of late capitalism and militarization. Reviewing Music for Porn, Lukas Moe described how the book worked within Halpern’s larger project: “In their concern with crisis these books are timely and yet already late, compressing the language, time, and sensorium of the very recent past into a variable distortion of the present. They make a series, by definition unfinished, that is just recursive enough to go on without fulfilling its premise or predicate. Halpern’s poems bracket and cite themselves, often by means of the flat ventriloquism of italicized paraphrase. Sentences especially are spliced and interpolated in Halpern’s prose and prose poems, reflecting a tendency in his work to modulate between the less and more theoretical.”

Halpern’s scholarly work reflects his interests in modernist writing, capitalism, and form. His critical work has appeared in collections such as Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (2009), as well as in many journals, anthologies, reviews, and zines. He currently teaches at Eastern Michigan University and splits his time between Ypsilanti, Michigan, and San Francisco, California.

Reviews

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for American Postmodernism class. Kind of sped through this and think you really need to take your time absorbing each word to really get the full impact, but there is an interesting play on bodies, sex and war that I have not seen before done in such a style. It would be good to look at other writings using a New Narrative technique.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read because someone has reserved my library copy.
I didn't take all of it in but it will be interesting to study. It would be interested to look at porn and military.

[tilda · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5