The New Boma

Description

Poetry. If neoliberalism is dying, something worse might already be on the horizon. Hung Q Tu's books Verisimilitude (Atelos 2000) and Structures of Feeling (Krupskaya 2003) attuned to the conditions of this turn two decades before from a San Francisco tech bubble and burst at the so-called end of history. Where Tu's previous books looked ahead to see the finitude of growth and an end to capital expansion, THE NEW BOMA takes a clear-eyed look at where we've been to offer a sober analysis of where we might be headed. Tu's poems counter the hysteric discourse of domestic politics in the US with a transnational perspective on globalized economies in decline. Cultural particulars and emotional registers collide to create localized systems of meaning in which we encounter the comfort and joy, pain and meaning available to us on the way to these freshest of hells. THE NEW BOMA doesn't reconcile so much as counterpose and balance its "knowledge of insecurities to come' with the 'Sublime Transition" to economic precarity in which an increasing many of us already live.

"In the early days of the twenty-first century, Hung Q. Tu published two stunning books of caustically hilarious poetry and then disappeared. But he’s back with THE NEW BOMA, a collection that delights as much as it pummels. It is so good to read him again, to remember that poetry can be both antagonistic to capitalism and wildly funny at the same time. This is the poetry that the world needs right now.”
—Juliana Spahr

”Work makes money like pain makes suffering. If the world of Hung Q. Tu’s NEW BOMA feels like our own, that’s because it’s dangling just overhead, a network of heavenly enclosures and governmental orifices. With delicious acuity and grave humor, Tu admins a delinquent newspeak while wandering about scenes of dread and adversarial excitation, serving deadpan declarations and absurdist interventions along the way. High-definition, dynamic, NEW BOMA burns like a self-immolating Tesla: “when everyone’s responsible / no one is responsible.” Meticulously wending imperialisms and capitalisms past and present, Tu addresses the forces that make war a lifestyle and culture a war. Pain can make us laugh, but when the tongue’s been lost in the cheek? An elegy is in order.”
—J Gordon Faylor

”Just when we may feel that we are forever inevitably living in a present where our future is ‘in its rightful place in the past’, Hung Q Tu’s THE NEW BOMA is astonishing poetry claiming a future from a slag heap of contradictions that makes you shiver with recognition. Addressing us with sly intimacy and leading us through charged linkages with wicked humor, this book is a hammer-on-nail critique created both obliquely and precisely. Poetry here is a compressed and expansive form of refusal and welcome: come and get it.”
—Jeff Derksen

Author Bio