Description

Anvil Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 10, 2024

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Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poemsdocuments the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, and spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries, and festivals. Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s,Playlistfiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks contextual introductions and ends with the songs or in this instance, poems to which they refer. InPlaylist, introductions can act less as supporting words than as discrete stories. At the same time, the poems they are in service of can appear indifferent to story, sentiment, and a writer who, in claiming to contextualize them, can only reduce them further.

The approach championed here is derived from Angela Carters writings on burlesque the exaggeration in this instance born from binaries our progressive liberal culture claims to deplore but, often whimsically, deploys on its social media platforms, too often without regard for consequence. Though these poems arent expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.