Lulu Marketplace

Francis Raven's original poems—with the occasional, collaborative and smartly alarmed interventions of Jeff Bacon—take on a world made hopelessly abundant by too much. Too many commodities, too much philosophy, too much poetry, too much music, too many reviews, too many misunderstood friendships, erotic deceptions and, of course, corporate obstacles, including the language of insufferable meetings: Our wires got crossed. We must be sitting in multiple meetings. In playful, subtle and deceptively sharp language—from consciously flat to purely and quite beautifully poetic—Francis Raven has taken on these days of nausea to replant the flag, the stroke, and necessity of the poem: Every painting has been landed on by critical flags, claimed: Swimming, I find a mystery in a poem I thought was a problem, solved. —Stephen Vincent, author of Walking Theory