Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes, Alan Gilbert’s sprawling book of poems, The Everyday Life of Design, finds its subjects everywhere and nowhere. Trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit tenuous spaces while also seeking to elude them and propose a better future. While the book’s strategy may be to document obsessively, the aim is not to record the received, but to overturn it and move beyond the damage it has done. Bleak, funny, elegiac, absurd, politically engaged, despairing, and hopeful, The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices.