Joe Amato Libri

"Anyone who looks beyond the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape outside its commercial walls is just as varied as that of visual art, just as wild, just as conceptual: novels in the form of dioramas, narratives read through virtual-reality glasses, or told as a series of tweets, stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting, genetic code, pixels, skin-as well as print and sound. The 100+ prose works and poems that make up Conceptualisms all have the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into literature. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature, and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. Experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature ... Across the years, a variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that, like conceptual visual art, foregrounds its ideas, explores new forms, challenges mainstream writing traditions, strives for ways to speak to the present. Along with whatever else they do, they ask, Why isn't this also literature?-and keep the boundaries of literature flexible and unresolved. Now, for the first time, here is an anthology that offers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. The first major anthology of this other tradition, Conceptualisms presents writing by over 90 authors, across three generations, representing a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to their subjects. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped the nature of contemporary writing, such Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. They'll also find authors, and responses to the canon, that they haven't yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live"-- Provided by publisher

Despite the dedicatio/warning—“not for everyone”—this book is indeed for everyone. Joe Amato is a straight talker able to weave those tough gossamer gab lines into strands for a dinger of a poetry rope lassoing the facts. The work’s (manu)facture enlivens an endangered a poetry of facts, with which he drives a word-stake through the American (wet) dream. Hear, hear him, comrades, read Amato’s hoarse-powered ode for this “Poor dumb oilrigged hydrofracked Fukushima’d bastard / civilization”—though there is nothing oily about his message, because “Wethinks poetry is crude, baby, fundamentally crude.” And needs to be so in/for a country where “we note what strange fruit falls / with supremacist fictions run amok.” This “blues that stays news,” these “Urgencies of some noirceur, police / state tactics…” need a poetry-vérité as we speak of a cinéma vérité and Joe Amato’s eye & ear for these Younighted States—close cousins to Jean Rouch’s hand-held camera—manage to scan an “Earth that at its best is one hell of a / paradise.”— Pierre Joris, author of An American Suite & A Nomad Poetics