Alan Gilbert
The Everyday Life of Design
$24.00 | November 2024 | ISBN 978-1-959708-09-4
In stock
Bleak, absurd, elegiac, and politically incisive, Alan Gilbert’s sprawling epic poem is a document of these broken times, with a glint of hope for a better tomorrow.
The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices to document the received. Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes while trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit precarious spaces while also seeking to elude them. Building on the legacies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Anne Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy, and Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy for the four elements, Gilbert’s project grows over time with additional poems, rearrangements, and revisions. The present 300+ page volume represents the second revised and expanded iteration of Gilbert’s ongoing magnum opus.
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“Radiant, intimate, horizonless.”
—Paul Chan
The Everyday Life of Design is a brilliant bricolage of life’s endless repetitions. These poems amuse and terrify as they slow down the blink of perception. Ordinariness and entropy are braided into an emotional landscape: “as the machines talk to each other without moving their lips, / the land scorched where I thought I might find you / when we are only trying to get to love.” Having lived inside this stunning collection, which in turn lives inside our own smallest moments, I feel more lyrically attuned to my own perception of the present—its sundown and gesture, its passing flicker.
—Claudia Rankine
The accuracy of these poems makes us their bull’s-eye, their dense mystery not just in each poem but in each line. A line, just a line here, is an entire poem’s worth of discernment, which is to say something new gets planted in us for a clarity that only the spontaneity of a genius poet like Alan Gilbert can provide. I am always grateful for such a collection, a book to keep for life.
—CAConrad
These poems wander around in the outskirts of late capitalism, moving from one room to the next, noticing all the connections, such as how the raccoons move in before the arrival of Abercrombie & Fitch, while also never forgetting that “we’re on the verge of extinction.” They are transformative, funny, and often heartbreaking.
—Juliana Spahr
This book is a valiant reordering of poetic priority—content and pace and overload and blankness all come before any of the usual grasping attempts to generate poetic meaning. And, as trite as it sounds, “The Everyday Life of Design” finds that there is love left in the wake.
—Stuart Beal, Columbia Spectator
This book is a large project devoted to accretion, both at the level of the line working endlessly to capture this multitude of fragments or rubble from everyday life, and also at the level of the book itself.
—Anastasios Karnazes, LARB
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Alan Gilbert is the author of three previous books of poetry, The Everyday Life of Design (Studio / SplitLevel Texts), The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts), and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books). He is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press). He is the recipient of a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and Adjunct Associate Professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program.