Overview
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.Author Biography
Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poetry including Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2006), Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), and Music for Porn (Nightboat Books 2012). Halpern’s critical essays appear in Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, ON: Contemporary Practice and The Claudius App. His writing on Georges Perec, including translations of Perec’s early essays on aesthetics and politics, can be found in Review of Contemporary Fiction and Chicago Review. A founding participant in the Nonsite Collective, he lives in San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University. Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poetry, including Disaster Suites, Music for Porn, and Rumored Place. His critical essays have appeared in the Claudius App, the Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, and ON: Contemporary Practice. He is a founding participant in the Nonsite Collective and teaches at Eastern Michigan University. He lives in San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, Sam Ladkin specialises in contemporary American poetry.