Poetry. In his third book, Ben Doller troubles the blast zone where evolution and manifest destiny collide. Working from primary sources including Captain William Dampier's pirate narratives and the Widow Ching legend (as immortalized by Borges), DEAD AHEAD develops a semi-psychological narrative along the lines of description, variation, embodiment, and pastiche/"piracy." While Dampier is (in)famous for both his practical and linguistic piracy—stealing words into the English language such as "barbecue" and "avocado"—the Widow Ching famously commandeered the pirate fleet of her husband yet ultimately relinquished her power in response to nature's signs and portents. Doller sets about bringing these sources together in a 21st-century collagist text, a critique of language, naturalness, and empowerment. With meditations on common, colonizing objects—such as the porch, the column, and the city—the poems in DEAD AHEAD look straight on at the pleasures of stealing, the perils of travel, and the ends of the earth.
Author City: Los Angeles, CA USA
Ben Doller (né Doyle) is the author of the books Radio, Radio (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), selected by Susan Howe for the 2000 Walt Whitman Award; FAQ: (Ahsahta Press, 2009); and DEAD AHEAD (Fence Books, 2010). Doller co-edits the Kuhl House Contemporary Poets series and has taught in sundry states. He lives in Los Angeles with Sandra Doller (née Miller) and their animals.
Reviews and Other Links
Sean Singer @ The Rumpus
Matt Soucy @ Coldfront
Books Noted @ Poets.org
Seth Abramson @ The Huffington Post
“What, along the line, lies dead ahead? Nothing so dull as a straightaway here: only lyrical twists of euphony with their trippy curves of thought. You can bet your bottom dollar that these poems are going to bend your mind around their complex corners to a better life.”
—Christian Bök
“Smart, fun, and gorgeous! Ben Doller has managed a book of poetry that's a page-turner. Always inventive and always unpredictable, Doller has reached a new level of rangy connectivity in the collection. He also approaches beauty from a new angle, contrasting the muscle of his torqued language with a sensuous insistence on sound—and the leaps of thought throughout are nothing short of Olympic.”
—Cole Swensen
“In DEAD AHEAD Ben Doller mixes the propositional logic of analytical philosophy with the brightly festooned cultural logic of Marianne Moore or John Ashbery, fusing high and low, formal and demotic registers in a mobile force field. Doller botanizes on public idiolects, creating imaginary landscapes out of fragments of social discourse that may very well constitute new kind of utopia. Just when you think you recognize the landscape, you are diverted onto a new plane—somewhere else in Hell or Paradise—and like Alice you follow a line of reason until it is met by flying morphemes in section, fungible verbal particles forming new wholes. As he says, in a phrase that could speak to the book’s brilliant linguistic DNA, ‘On each inch grid a different swab of culture.’ This is an amazing collection.”
—Michael Davidson