Dog Day Economy

Vocabularies of decaying presence and economic despair tumble together in Ted Rees’s DOG DAY ECONOMY, enacting conflicts of late capitalism where the body is squandered in endless ramshackle systems of flow. This is exacting, spontaneous poetry of intimacy and distance, of longshots and dubious bodily substances. I am reminded of Saint-John Perse’s ANABASE, though of course Rees’s grandeur comes from the other end of the telescope: ‘Like we were riding through desert: / polite way to say/we were seeing nought but mayhem/in each other’s viscera.’ The image can go anywhere, but where is it going? Collaging and repurposing gives these poems the external feeling of a sublimely blathering oracle, and by that I mean they hide and reveal fascinating predictions of our doom.–Robert Gl, ck

Poetry.