The Everyday Life of Design
2020
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.
Alan Gilbert is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts) and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem). He is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press). He is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature.
Studio is an imprint of SplitLevel Texts.