Blurb by Tan Lin

Trade Paperback. Experimental poetry(?) book format!

Can reading be like the moment before one reads an airline boarding pass or a rental car agreement or a permissions letter? My feeling is that yes, fundamentally, it can.

Is this a poetry book that is not quite there except in some controlled vocabulary (micro-niche) system? Or else is it part of a series of book titles divided or displaced by a specific publication history, distribution format, a death, classification system, meta-data container, a bit of domestic tranquility, and a bar code—in other words a system of inferences or actions or recipes or typos or captions or cataloging systems directed to the heterogeneity that is a “book” before it becomes a book?

There is an interesting article where Tan Lin is interviewed about this book and other ideas here:

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2010/03/29/tan-lin/

Tan Lin is a writer, artist, and critic. He has written Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (published by Sun & Moon Press). His visual and video work has been exhibited at the Yale Art Museum (New Haven), the Sophienholm (Copenhagen), and the Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York City). His writing has appeared in a variety of contemporary literary and cultural journals, including Conjunctions, Purple, Black Book, and Cabinet. He is a professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University.

Contributions by Christopher Alexander, Louis Asekoff, Stan Apps, Danielle Aubert, Charles Bernstein, E. Shaskan Bumas, Ken Chen, Cecilia Corrigan, Clare Churchouse, AMJ Crawford, Kieran Daly, Mónica de la Torre, Thom Donovan, Patrick Durgin, Kareem Estefan, Robert Fitterman, Jonathan Flatley, Peter Fong, Christopher Funkhouser, Kristen Gallagher, Sarah Gambito, Kenneth Goldsmith, Diana Hamilton, Eddie Hopeley, Paolo Javier, Josef Kaplan, John Keene, Matthew Landis, Juliette Lee, Maya Lin, Warren Liu, Patrick Lovelace, Rachel Malik, Dan Machlin, Michael Ondaatje, Asher Penn, Josiah McElheny, Stephen McLaughlin, Jay Sanders, Katherine Sanders, Jeremy Sigler, Danny Snelson, Chris Sylvester, Gordon Tapper, Michele Taransky, Dan Visel, Dorothy Wang, and Sara Wintz.