Weak Link

by Rob Halpern

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. WEAK LINK is an interstitial work containing poems, poem-essays, prose sequences, letters, translations, exercises, and manifestos. Everything collected in it has been recovered from the faults and cracks within and between four books--RUMORED PLACE, DISASTER SUITES, MUSIC FOR PORN and COMMON PLACE--which together comprise one long serial work. No book can ever contain itself, so while the work included in WEAK LINK has not been moored to any of the aforementioned titles, it remains integral to the larger canvass this work exceeds.

A critical essay on WEAK LINK's title sequence, called "Contemporary Lyric and Epic A Reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link," by John Wilkinson, appeared in Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 2010).

First published January 1, 2009

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.