Robert Glück

Rob Halpern

A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. Out of print for decades, Glück’s paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover’s discourse unlike any other.

Jack the Modernist

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.

Music for Porn

Poetry. "A paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful DISASTER SUITES into motion. They produce a music--'missing in the count now counts as one'--reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it audible: war, so-called natural catastrophe, a 'public sphere where there is no / Public.' As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present--which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster's lyric 'I' summons its own kind of 'counting' (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard--'the drowned and the bombed'--in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays down: the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, shit, fuck, and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again"--Sianne Ngai.

Disaster Suites

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Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Literary Criticism. FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS: NEW NARRATIVE AS CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE offers the first comprehensive anthology of essays regarding New Narrative writing and community practices by a younger generation of practitioners and scholars. As editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, "We are not interested in offering an 'authoritative' canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative's history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn't want to be 'fixed, ' codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. One of our motivating questions is Why New Narrative now? Or, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment? In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as 'New Narrative, ' we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing." Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions. Other topics of investigation include the category of queer art, the importance of "feeling," the fiction of personality, the necessity of risk, the function of pedagogy, the strategy of appropriation, as well as scandal and gossip as these topics have been important to New Narrative and its expanded sphere of influence. Contributors include: Lindsey Boldt, Brandon Brown, David Buuck, Amanda Davidson, Robert Dewhurst, Thom Donovan, Joel Fares, Ariel Goldberg, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Colin Herd, Kaplan Harris, Arnold J. Kemp, Trisha Low, Jason Morris, Trace Peterson, Ted Rees, Camille Roy, Kathy Lou Schultz, Eric Sneathen, Brian Teare, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Catherine Wagner, and Stephanie Young.

New Narrative As Contemporary Practice

From Our Hearts to Yours

Rob Halpern's new sequence of poems speaks to social, environmental, and personal crisis--from white supremacist violence and wildfires raging just north of San Francisco, to the death of his father--all of which are tempered by the joyful birth of his daughter, whose new life offers relief in the darkness. He calls the poems "hieroglyphs" with a tip of the hat to Marx, for whom the "hieroglyphic" appearance of the world translates "the secret" of our catastrophe. But as Halpern notes, "the secret of the thing may well be that there is no secret." Here, investigation, analysis, and healing converge, as Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World tests the promise and the failure of cultural production, specifically lyric poetry, in the midst of disaster. In his afterword to the book, Halpern asks, "Can the moment arrested by the poem's burnished amber show us something we don't already know about the world?" And if not, what is the social function of the poem? Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but this book attempts a response.

Rob Halpern

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