Off Message

In fiber-optic-fast meditations on everything from Marxism to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without being preachy, contemporary without being cloying, funny without being flip, these poems are unafraid to implicate themselves: like us, their speakers are part of the problem, and their struggles highlight the absurdities of broadband capitalism. What should we think of televised warfare, crackdowns on Twitter, and factory farms? What pages should we take from our history books? Off Message wrestles with questions like these by overlaying the near and the far, the lyric and the encyclopedic. Each poem is a mixtape, an abandoned essay, a satire of modern conscience.

JOEL BROUWER is the author of Exactly What Happened (1999), Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), and And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at the University of Alabama.