{"title":"Action, Spectacle Press","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"toy-soldiers","title":"Toy Soldiers","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eTOY SOLDIERS\u003c\/em\u003e, Michael Chang continues to brew up a new and distinctive poetry, steeped in New York School precedent and our everyday digital detritus. \u003cem\u003eTOY SOLDIERS\u003c\/em\u003e is what happens when play turns deadly serious, when the gameboard flips to reveal, of all things, real life. These are fierce poems of intense flavor, of extreme volume: \"all the mothers singing \/ pickled by birds \/ shredded into wild ginger.\" There is no way off this ride, so best to grip hard at whatever you've got, or whoever is sitting near you. And yes, love shines here, or at least a glimmer of it. \"how do u flirt w. someone who has everything ???\" It starts, I think, with the sheer heat of the spoken word. Are these poems, \"namedropping \u0026amp; scanning the room,\" hilarious, earnest, opaque, playful, sexy, sardonic, forthright, political, gossipy? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But above all, as one poem boasts, this is a \"poetry . . . aimed at destroying ugly shit.\" Take cover: that aim is somehow at once wild and true.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMICHAEL CHANG\u003c\/strong\u003e (they\/them) is the author of \u003cem\u003eSYNTHETIC JUNGLE\u003c\/em\u003e (Northwestern University Press, 2023) \u0026amp; \u003cem\u003eTHE HEARTBREAK ALBUM \u003c\/em\u003e(Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at \u003cem\u003eFence.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Irreverent, sensual, live-wire language . . . carving strange landscapes out of everyday materials and good gossip alike. I think I'll just stay here for a while, if you don't mind, inside this book, this mind, this sensibility.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eEmily Skillings\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"What a relief it is to come across Michael Chang's electrifying TOY SOLDIERS. A book of poems that are so inspired and full of nerve and skill as to leave me breathless. These poems radiate heat, longing, and love. They are all I want to read.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eMichael Dickman\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Action, Spectacle Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49241816334653,"sku":"9798218396381","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9798218396381ita.jpg?v=1723745893"},{"product_id":"waiting-for-perec-esperando-a-perec-2","title":"Waiting for Perec \/ Esperando a Perec","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWaiting for Perec\u003c\/i\u003e, first published in a bilingual Spanish\/Italian edition in 2015, is Mario Meléndez's fourth full-length collection of poems. As poet, translator, and associate professor of creative writing at Princeton Katie Farris has noted, \"It is a tightly woven book of visions in which truly only three characters appear: God, Death, and a passive Christ. Then there are the cameos a brilliant and bewildering crowd of artists, poets, actors, characters, and creatures who step in and out of the dance of these three characters, doing imitations of God or tracking him, holding Christ's bone in his mouth, running ahead of Death on a wooden tricycle, and generally making shenanigans with corpses, being corpses, or digging graves.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs the Colombian writer Piedad Bonnett, winner of the 2024 Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Literature, has observed, Meléndez's poetry is \"nourished by obsessions.\" Indeed, \u003ci\u003eWaiting for Perec\u003c\/i\u003e is a poetry obsessed with the notion of writing as an art of reassemblage. Meléndez developed this mode of writing where the poet is a bricoleur who obsessively combines and recombines images and words and churns out new visions of the world based on fragments and references culled from the dusty attic-trunk that keeps the bits and bobs high and low culture in his previous collection \u003ci\u003eDeath's Days Are Numbered\u003c\/i\u003e. The cameos that comprise the collection include painters (Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero), musicians (John Lennon, Charlie Parker), novelists (Jules Verne, Julio Cortázar), film actors (Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe), poets (César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik), fictional characters (Phileas Fogg, Madame Bovary), and religious figures (Judas, Mary Magdalene). This incomplete list, which omits Kafka, Heraclitus, Salome, Diego Maradona, The Sex Pistols, and others, shows the range of references used by this book to build an absurd world where fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike the work of Fernando Pessoa, who makes an appearance in these poems, \u003ci\u003eWaiting for Perec\u003c\/i\u003e is written under a heteronym, that of an anonymous urn maker who scribbles down these ecstatic visions. Yet, as Anthony Geist, Professor of Spanish at Washington University and celebrated translator of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Luis Hernández, has noted \"every poem begins with 'I saw…' What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ'.\" This ambiguity is a sort of no space, a utopia, the ashes of a funerary urn.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile the book plays with the absurd and with nonsense, it does so in the utterly serious tradition of Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino. The title alludes to the Irish author Samuel Beckett, a practitioner of literary nonsense, and the French novelist George Perec, member of the Oulipo group and a lover of word play. Meléndez, like Beckett and Perec, plays with the absurd and like them his world is tinged with melancholy. To quote Farris, again, in this collection, \"Death has never seemed so lively; like Blake's hell, the realm of \u003ci\u003eWaiting for Perec\u003c\/i\u003e is thriving. Like Christ reading Cortázar, I find myself wanting to read Mario Meléndez, in his own words 'so as not to cry\/ he makes my loneliness disappear\/ as if by magic'.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Action, Spectacle Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50734088716605,"sku":"9798218613969","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9798218613969ita_40b09f3a-f16a-4ab0-ba66-af0eca5a1c8d.jpg?v=1757612173"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/action-spectacle-press.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}