The Treatment of Monuments

Poetry. THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS collects four long poems written in varying styles. The first poem in the book, "Relative Heat Index," is a serial poem in twenty-three parts that attempts to capture the personal and political climate of the United States plunged by its leaders into war following the September 11 attacks. Influenced by Robert Hayden's "Words in the Mourning Time" and George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous," which were similarly written during a decade of war and social upheaval, "Relative Heat Index" uses a fragmentary approach to speak the unspoken while also leaving spaces of silence to indicate the impossibility of fully capturing in a single poem the totality of war—domestic and abroad—and its devastations.

"A sequence of propulsive poems best read in one sitting, Alan Gilbert's THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS harnesses what it describes as poetry's broken voice and puts it in the service of social critique and cultural elegy. Signaling the failure of history to point a way toward a future and the perceived inevitability of corruption's lasting win, the poems make a stand for a kind of protest, lest we be left 'scrubbing capital's bathroom / with a toothbrush and one shredded square of paper towel.' These are poems for the end times that know no end. They won't cheer you up, but they will keep you company in your rage, and just possibly light a fire under you—all while making you, occasionally, laugh. It's what happens when a poem takes corporate absurdity to its logical conclusion: 'First the legroom / is removed, then the legs.' And when questions with knowable answers—'How much force can a building withstand?' are bound to those without—'What are the conditions of knowledge?' or 'Where is the love?' The love is in a certain fearlessness, put better by Gilbert himself: 'No one hedges / their bets when the only outcome is loss.'"—Anna Moschovakis

Alan Gilbert is the author of the poetry books THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS (SplitLevel Texts, 2012) and LATE IN THE ANTENNA FIELDS (Futurepoem Books, 2011), and a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), which examines conceptual documentary strategies in contemporary poetry and visual art. His poems have appeared in publications such as The Baffler, BOMB, Boston Review, Chicago Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, FENCE, jubilat, and The Nation. His writings on poetry and art have appeared in a variety of publications, including Aperture, Artforum Bookforum, Cabinet, Modern Painters, Parkett, Time Out New York, etc. He's written about books and art regularly for the Village Voice and reviewed poetry for The Believer. He spent the summer of 2008 blogging for the Poetry Foundation's Harriet site, and again in April 2010, 2011, and 2012 for National Poetry Month. Gilbert has contributed art catalogue essays and entries for a number of biennials, group shows, and solo exhibitions. He's the recipient of a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature (poetry). He has taught poetry workshops, art writing, art history, and studio art at Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Cooper Union, and the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. During the 1990s, Gilbert was a co-editor of the influential poetry journal apex of the M. He has a PhD in English literature from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He currently lives in Brooklyn.