Showing & Telling: Penetrating Fantasy in Brandon Hobson’s Desolation of Avenues Untold
Hobson infers we’re always talking about ourselves, about our failures to see thoroughly beyond ourselves, our inability to thoroughly excavate or explore a self away from geographical or social exigencies. Our drive is towards historical inevitability and, ultimately, we end with mimicry; that’s what culture is for in Desolate City. We try and coerce and collate our moments of self-reflection together into a coherent whole but, as one of Hobson’s characters suggests, recollection is always fractal.
Dominic Jaeckle reviews Desolation of Avenues Untold by Brandon Hobson.
Animals & other poems
They work hard to gyrate their round bodies full like circles, trying on that true shapes are not halves but simply overlap. She is at the window watching oriental women cross the street in long dresses with great patterns. He is in the dining room spooning vanilla tufts from a plastic cup.
By Emily Carney.
The Wellness Syndrome
The Wellness Syndrome reveals how our current age is marked by a pathological and dangerous fixation with “health” and “wellness,” an obsession that effectively targets individuals with its market-based rhetoric of personal and professional well-being, while strategically masking deeper contradictions of modern neo-liberal capitalism.
Peter Bloom reviews Carl Cederström and Andr é Spicer‘s The Wellness Syndrome.