Description
Poetry. Art. Winner of the 2016 Sawtooth Prize. The poems in Nelson's CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY present a plethora of resistances to normalization. The resistances are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-misogynist; they include fantasies of subverting surveillance technology and big-data algorithms; and sometimes they rely on breakdowns of communication into sonic mimicry, as in a series of poems gibbered by the "Sleeper" agent. Grief about failed escape attempts yields not to optimism about any future, but rather to a reorganization of history as permanently open to multiple meanings. Nelson, an art historian, believes in "art's power to reform bad archives."
"This book is wicked. Who knew that poetry could frack the totality?"—Anne Boyer
Author Bio
Jennifer Nelson is the author of AIM AT THE CENTAUR STEALING YOUR WIFE (Ugly Duckling Press, 2015); CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY, winner of the Sawtooth Prize (Ahsahta, 2017); and HARM EDEN (Ugly Duckling Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Panda's Friend, A Perfect Vacuum, Social Text, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; she was the Offen Poet at the University of Chicago in 2020. She is also assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and the author of Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein's Ambassadors (Penn State University Press, 2019).
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA