Poetics of Work
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A state of emergency has been declared in France. In Lyon, protesters and police clash in the streets. At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipian experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The city of Lyon is in chaos in French writer Lefebvre's turbulent, incisive chronicle of an unemployed poet (after Blue Self-Portrait). The poet unnamed or identified by gender occupies their time smoking joints, gorging on bananas, rereading Whitman, and meditating on the lessons of fascist Germany while the city is rocked by riots over unspecified causes ("resistance is an electrical idea, the vocabulary is going blind, the subject is under surveillance") and the police force runs amok. Mostly the narrator embarks on Platonic dialogues with their father, a hard-drinking cynical pragmatist aspiring to the promise of middle-class comfort while tossing out rejoinders like "What earthly good is poetry when lunatics filled with global hatred are blowing their brains out?" Taking up the challenge, Lefebvre s shiftless narrator searches for the place of poetry in a world gone mad, where the "culture sector is a graveyard for the soul's repose." The result is a series of lessons ("try not to knock yourselves out in the name of Liberty; take a bath or watch The Simpsons") and an interior monologue filled with sharp observations, hysterical asides, and a sincere search for personal truth. This is not the kind of novel where things happen, but its bracing contemporary rhythms hold the reader's attention. Lefebvre succeeds at mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis.
