Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book - Softcover

Doris, Stacy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931824185 ISBN 13: 9781931824187

Publisher: Roof Books, 2014

Synopsis

Poetry. "In the way that Little Nemo never quite reaches his dreamland desires, the team players in Stacy Doris' 'cultural' gudie will never finish their game. They (and we) are suspended in the animated crackle of a postnuclear mythology. Classic texts--Mayan, Tibetan, New Jerseyan--are re-released as videogame. What is the job of an ancient lineage when future acncestries are bound to be bioengineered? Read this book for the stats and scores"--Jena Osman. Stacy Doris' books written in English include Knot, CONFERENCE, PARAMOUR and KILDARE. Written in French are Parliament and, semi-anonymously, LA vie de Chester Steven Wiener ecrite par sa femme, and Une annee a New York avec Chester. He has co-edited three collections of French poetry translated by American poets, and she is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

If a football team composed of players from the Popul Vuh and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were forced into citizenship rites that involved playing school football at "Twisted or Deception High," the results would be something like the latest, beautiful, uncategorizable work from Doris. Published nearly simultaneously with the very different but similarly daring Knot (University of Georgia), Cheerleader's Guide tracks society's bases in timeless, evil small-group dynamics through an ingenious formal gambit. Using a withering faux-naïve diction ("victory / takes brains but not for thinking"), Doris imbues characters like "N0t Righ+ N0w," "Laugh1ng M1rrors Puk1ng" and "Dry-Me Out" with a violence and scale that feels at once queasily of-the-political-minute and gorgeously timeless. Each page contains a few short stanzas at the top, and, at bottom, a football diagram with x's, o's and lines showing where the characters move in relation to one another. Each reads like a sudden-death play at fourth down, where "what's human is formations / and drills" and "The Team's ball is just / an ovoid knife"; the whole resembles an ironic instruction manual for joining a society stuck in a very sick game. (July)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Roof Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1931824185
• ISBN 13: 9781931824187
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88