Description
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. WEAK LINK is an interstitial work containing poems, poem-essays, prose sequences, letters, translations, exercises, and manifestos. Everything collected in it has been recovered from the faults and cracks within and between four books—RUMORED PLACE, DISASTER SUITES, MUSIC FOR PORN and COMMON PLACE—which together comprise one long serial work. No book can ever contain itself, so while the work included in WEAK LINK has not been moored to any of the aforementioned titles, it remains integral to the larger canvass this work exceeds.
A critical essay on WEAK LINK's title sequence, called "Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A Reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link," by John Wilkinson, appeared in Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 2010).
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