At LARB: We Are Nothing and So Can You by Jasper Bernes

Jasper Bernes's We Are Nothing and So Can You (Commune Editions 2015) is reviewed at Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Gunter writes that the book "exemplifies the aesthetics of uprising, taking seriously the social form in which the prevailing conditions are rejected in favor of an as-yet-unformed future."

Bernes draws his material from contemporary radical political practice, from the UC student movements of 2009–’11, to Occupy, the global wave of anti-austerity politics, Black Lives Matter, and related anti-police movements. This fidelity to the antagonisms of the present is decisive for Commune Editions, the AK Press imprint based in Oakland, California. Poetry and politics often run together in Oakland, a city home to both a deeply rooted radical history and intense waves of gentrification mixed with police violence. Started by Bernes and his co-conspirators Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, Commune Editions is the latest collaboration between the three writers. In a contentious series organized for the poetry journal Jacket2, the trio thought through the “intersection of poetry and communist/anarchist activity.” Insistently writing with the pronoun “we,” they investigated the present imbrication of poetry and politics as well as the future of poetry “beyond poets and poems.”

Bernes takes up these concerns in We Are Nothing and So Can You. The poem’s content was gleaned from nights spent circumventing lines of riot cops and overtaking freeways, while its form alternates between prose poetry and lineation, wavering between different registers of historical time. The lineated sections address the present state of social movements while the prose sections speculate on a future after the fall of our late capitalist social order. Both inevitably draw upon the historical past as the force that conditions the present and from which the future can be imagined.

Find an excerpt from the book and the full review at LARB.

At top, photo courtesy of the Poetics Research Bureau.