The Future of Memory

Overview

Perelman's substantial new collection, his ninth since 1975 and a standout even in this exceptionally rich year of poetry publication, opens with the bizarre confession that "Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for/ decades." This perhaps ironic retraction of a career spent in resolute avant-gardism ("I / seem to have lost my avant-garde // card in the laundry") is only the first in a dizzying series of raids on a bank of personal and collective false memories, an investigation of socially produced irreality where every dream is faked, all the currencies are counterfeit, perception is hallucinatory and cognition programmed: "The thought-track wakes and thinks," he writes in "The Masque of Rhyme," "novelty again, the same old novelty. // It's almost worse than royalty."

Capacious, hilarious, allusive and disturbing, The Future of Memory shows that there is a future for poetry, poetry as presence of mind, active repossession of the senses, deconcealment of mystified structures; of risk, not recapitulation. At the close of "The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake," Perelman writes: "Those deprogrammed people glimmering beyond / the evening's blocky conspiracy theories, / willing their present without shooting our past / to a bloody parable / ?have you found a way to call them yet?" This book suggests that he has. —Publishers Weekly

Author Biography

Bob Perelman is the author of 14 poetry collections, including Iflife, Virtual Reality, and Ten to One: Selected Poems. He collaborated with his wife, the painter Francie Shaw, on Playing Bodies. His latest critical book is Modernism the Morning After. He taught at UPenn for 25 years and now lives in Berkeley.