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| Exit Theater
ISBN: 9781885635549
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University Press of Colorado
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Consumption (Economics) -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Poetry; Justice -- Poetry;
Lala merges verse, academic text, and lyric essay with writing for the stage in an elegiac debut collection meant to be beheld and enacted. This provocative book is designed as an immersive experience, featuring verse that can be classified as poetry only in that it announces itself as such: this is performance, myth creation, and rally cry. In his understated confrontations with forms of societal violence-militarism, climate change, economic collapse-Lala attends to the musicality of language, seductively contrasting the lush with the sparse: "Dusk falls in the gun cabinet/ the city in yellow silk// I pull its sash." Violence afflicts the book's form as well through the use of erasure, footnotes, URLs, and faded ink. Readers encounter transcripts of old tape recordings, stage directions, snippets of autobiography, and references to painter Cy Twombly, Shakespeare, and Catullus. Throughout, visual disjunctions and negative space wield tremendous power. The text can occasionally feel alienating, cryptic, or distancing, as if it were "a veil/ at the edge/ of experience." This a dense and challenging yet rewarding read; Lala engages with playful structural elements as he experiments with alternate means of interrogation and representation. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Mike Lala is a poet who works with text, recorded sound, and, occasionally, images. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Fence , the Brooklyn Rail , Denver Quarterly , Jubilat , the Awl , and Volt , as well as several chapbooks, most recently In the Gun Cabinet (The Atlas Review, 2016) and Twenty-Four Exits (A Closet Drama) (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). He holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MFA from New York University, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He lives in New York. www.mikelala.com |
