Steven Zultanski Reads New Collections by Stephanie Young, Ed Steck, Ben Fama, More

Steven Zultanski's latest contribution to the pages of Frieze reviews five new poetry collections with an eye to "language, politics and love." Beginning with Ben Fama's new book, Deathwish, Zultanski remarks that the "distant, cool (almost cold) tone of Ben Fama’s poetry emulates an illusion produced by internet culture and ubiquitous corporate media: that consumer desire has been elevated into desire as such." From there: 

Fama’s first book, Fantasy (2017), played chicken with what it was critiquing – high fashion, celebrity worship, the gig economy, posting – getting as close as possible to its subject matter at the risk of becoming identical with it, in order to find emotional nuance in cultural logics that appear monolithic and empty. Deathwish furthers this project, but with more vulnerability. Fama still lives in a world of commodities, but this time he also celebrates experiences that are, for better or worse, more than transactions: addiction, sadness, BDSM and friendship.

Though the book opens with a 14-page, all-caps list of celebrities in no discernable order, it quickly shifts gears into short-lined lyric poems concerning substance abuse, enthusiasm for sexual (and commercial) submission and lightly goth melancholia. In lines that coyly hide their affective complexity in declarative flatness, Fama arranges snippets of personal history into impersonal reflections on how conspicuous consumption and financial precarity shape relationships. There’s no liberation from the economic in Deathwish, but it does suggest the possibility of counter-hegemonic communities. And in the book’s most surprising, optimistic moment, Fama even alludes to hippie idealism: ‘let’s all get together / obstruct our various drives / that seem so clear  / when each is alone  / sunsets make me sad to die / love forever changes.’

Read more at Frieze. We have a choice cut from Deathwish, here, read and discussed by Fama himself. Enjoy!