Tyrone Williams Reviews Donato Mancini's Buffet World

Tyrone Williams reviews Vancouver poet Donato Mancini's color-ful, not -ing book Buffet World (New Star Books, 2011) for Jacket2. Highly recommend you read both texts...here's a hunk of Williams's take on the bricoleur:

Buffet World is one of those books that is “funny” but also utterly “serious.” That’s because the sublime and ridiculous, the outlandish and quotidian, are, in the world Mancini describes, two sides of the same gilded coin. Certainly the two “major” poems here, “If Violence (Hey You)” and the heartbreaking autobiographical “On Behalf of the Potato Chips Industry I Would Like To Wish You A Happy Birthday,” may be read as exhibits A and B in the trial to which Mancini submits capital. In the former, popular music serves as simply another mode of interpellation, commodifying pleasure as politics and memory as history (see, for baby boomers, “The Big Chill,”). Every generation gets to have “the soundtrack of our lives”: “turn around/bright eyes/hello it’s me.” Every soundtrack accompanies and facilitates the reduction of differences to the shrug of indifference posing as solidarity: “hey buddy, comrade, avenue/chum, would your people like a parade//you people/would you//and you people/like to apply/for a permit/to riot…” In the latter poem, Mancini recounts his malnutritioned, gluttonous childhood as a microcosm of primitive accumulation: “I always thought of Pringles/as a luxury food.// One leaf iceberg/lettuce on white discount// Baloney melts./ Options accrue.” Ballooning to an unhealthy weight, Mancini becomes, as all advertisers desire, another Pavlovian dog: “...How many//jingles make my mouth water.”

Read the full review at Jacket2.