by David Buuck (Author), Juliana Spahr (Author)

An Army of Lovers begins with the story of two poets, Demented Panda and Koki, united in their desire to write politically engaged poetry at a time when poetry seems to have lost its ability to effect social change. Their first project is more than a failure, resulting in a spell that unleashes a torrent of raw sewage and surrealistic embodiments of consumerist excess and black site torture techniques. Subsequent chapters feature an experimental composer (Koki?) and a performance artist (Panda?) whose bodies are literally invaded with the ills of capitalism, manifested through leaking blisters and other maladies, as well as a radical remix of a Raymond Carver story, questioning "What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry." The novel concludes with Panda and Koki returning to the site of their failed collaboration to conjure up a more utopian vision of "an army of lovers." Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd.

Author Biography

Juliana Spahr is the author of four books of poetry: Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow P, 2011), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (U of California, 2005), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan U, 2001), and Response (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon P, 1996). She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2007 she published The Transformation (Atelos), a book of prose which tells the story of three people who move between Hawai'i and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonialism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars. She edits with Jena Osman the book series Chain Links and with nineteen other poets she edits of the collectively funded Subpress. She has edited numerous critical anthologies and teaches at Mills College.

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