Description
Poetry. Taking Walt Whitman's Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern's MUSIC FOR PORN moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor. This collection is a bracing lyrical exploration of the ethical limits of our militarized and eroticized landscape.
"Rob Halpern's body of work in toto constitutes a rigorous intervention into the normative grammar of lyricism."—Tyrone Williams
Author Bio
Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Yspilanti, Michigan, where he organizes the Writers' Bloc Poetry Workshop inside Women's Huron Valley Prison, while teaching at Eastern Michigan University. His books include include HIEROGLYPHS OF THE INVERTED WORLD (Kenning Editions, 2021), WEAK LINK (Atelos, 2019), COMMON PLACE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and MUSIC FOR PORN (Nightboat Books, 2012). Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he co-edited From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (Contemporary Practice), which was listed among Entropy's "Best Non-Fiction" books of 2017. Halpern's critical and lyrical essays appear in Mediations, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, and Chicago Review, as well as the edited volumes Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, and Political Poetics: Poetry and Communism. He is the editor of Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays (Nightboat, 2020).
Author City: YPSILANTI, MI USA