A picaresque experimental novel, An Army of Lovers is the story of Demented Panda and Koki, two friends trying to be political poets in a time when poetry has lost its ability to effect social change. Their collaboration unleashes a torrent of consumerist excess that morphs into a Gitmo-style torture camp. Our heroes struggle to avoid complicity in the spectacle, yet are unable to overcome it through poetry. Instead it invades their bodies, manifesting itself through blisters and other symptoms, as the poets attempt to move beyond this impasse. Absurdist, fantastic, conceptual, Army is a novel for the Occupy generation.
Praise for An Army of Lovers:
"An Army of Lovers explores the liminal spaces where cities and individuals come together and stand apart with strange, brainy grace."—Michelle Tea, author of Mermaid in Chelsea Creek
"Two of my favorite poets, each with a unique voice, wangle a 'third mind' as they come together in a novel radically different than any I know. Like the 70s Rosa von Praunheim documentary on the 2nd wave gay rights movement (Army of Lovers or The Revolt of the Perverts), the newly minted Army of Lovers takes a stage crowded with multiple images, intent on creating a moment of revolutionary stillness inside the noise. Authors Spahr and Buuck, who appear in this novel as Bay Area poets 'Koki' and 'Demented Panda,' style it up all the way from magical realism to 'new journalism' and Raymond Carver Cathedralspeak, but it's the weary 'I can't go on. I'll go on' optimism at which wounded veterans of the army of lovers excel. Theirs is a rigorous book, and a book of marvels, with something funny, something painful, stirring on every page."—Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle
"Too often in the poetry world, self-awareness means dreary, self-important self-absorption. Thank goodness that is not the case here. This picaresque story about the 'particular lostness' of poetry, the ways poems always win and the lives of self-described 'mediocre' poets is actually pretty hilarious! It's also smart, incisive and politically astute. Now, to the barricades!" —Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances: Essays
Praise for Juliana Spahr's Well Then There Now:
"Spahr's fifth book of imaginative writing (both poems and prose) should be a blockbuster, a lasting disturbance; a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority; it is also the best, and perhaps the most widely accessible, thing that Spahr has done."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Praise for David Buuck's The Shunt:
"The Shunt's affective agenda is thus the exact opposite of ironic cynicism, which is one of this brilliantly discomforting book's most delightful surprises."—Sianne Ngai, Professor, Stanford University and author of Our Aesthetic Categories
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