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POETRY
144 Pages, 6 x 9
Formats: Trade Paper
Trade Paper, $20.00 (US $20.00) (CA $27.05)
Publication Date: March 2016
ISBN 9781931824651
Rights: WOR
Roof Books (Mar 2016)
Plato’s Closet treads indelicately yet with profound subtlety on the subject of community—the polis and the hinterland it populates with idyllic shepherds to distract from the scapegoats, thieves, heretics, and wolves proliferating there. By deploying an overwrought rhetoric by turns misogynist, melancholic, and masochistic, the poems attempt to trace the invisible curves and lumps of imperial masculinity, whose decadence has finally purified it of its civilized ornamentation—to the point where it can perhaps be drowned in the bathtub.Plato’s Closet’s references range from the classical to Internet porn, Urban Dictionary and gay male fetishism, and features warlords grooming protégés, female soldiers magically sprouting new hardware, and jilted lovers—of empire, of wisdom, of war—whose violent plaints signal the last redoubt of male sexual entitlement.
Lawrence Giffin is the author of several books of poetry, including White Future, Christian Name, and Non Facit Saltus. His work has been anthologized in Against Expression and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. His translation of Alain Badiou's The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process was published in Umbra. More can be found at www.lawrencegiffin.com. He lives in New York City.