Red Arcadia (Paperback, First UK)

Poetry. The poems of RED ARCADIA present a jittery, spasmodic--often obscured--series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism."These sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued poems register damage, reading commodities or movies for us, out there in shopping malls or imaginary museums. They resolutely think through the world, half-scratched mordant footnotes to our political realities. They offer small consolation. This neatly organized book presents a poetry of ideas, then, but concocted by an intelligence unusually passionate, raw nerve-endings tingling with 57 varieties of ersatz. Mark Scroggins's ventriloquy--knowing, ironical, satirical--is the book's singular pleasure, its delicate likeness chiming in our ears with delight."--Robert Sheppard"Mark Scroggins practices a literature of contained excess, drawn from the welter of experience and its reflexive twin, theory. His poetry combines Benjaminian and Zukofskyan author functions, disclosing the cultural logics of distributed financialization through the method of materialist inversion. As it turns out, these condensed surfaces are identical to the ages' insights insofar as we could ever hope to live them. Consonantal lushness, vocalic variation, beautiful lineation, sublime contradiction are the predominant features of Scroggins's perverse constructivism. Poetry is thereby redeemed in its damaged finality."--Barrett Watten