Everyday Life of Design

"Bleak, absurd, elegiac, and politically incisive, Alan Gilbert’s sprawling epic poem is a document of these broken times, with a glint of hope for a better tomorrow. The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices to document the received. Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes while trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit precarious spaces while also seeking to elude them. Building on the legacies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Anne Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy, and Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy for the four elements, Gilbert’s project grows over time with additional poems, rearrangements, and revisions. The present 300+ page volume represents the second revised and expanded iteration of Gilbert’s ongoing magnum opus."--