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. 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.

Alan Gilbert’s The Everyday Life of Design is a brilliant bricolage of life's endless repetitions. These poems amuse and terrify as they slow down the blink of perception. Ordinariness and entropy are braided into an emotional landscape: “as the machines talk to each other without moving their lips, / the land scorched where I thought I might find you / when we are only trying to get to love." Having lived inside this stunning collection, which in turn lives inside our own smallest moments, I feel more lyrically attuned to my own perception of the present—its sundown and gesture, its passing flicker. —CLAUDIA RANKINE

The accuracy of these poems makes us their bull's-eye, their dense mystery not just in each poem but in each line. A line, just a line here, is an entire poem's worth of discernment, which is to say something new gets planted in us for a clarity that only the spontaneity of a genius poet like Alan Gilbert can provide. I am always grateful for such a collection, a book to keep for life. —CACONRAD