Checking In consists of the major title poem (which takes up about half the book) and a series of other post-conceptual pieces that luxuriate in the physicality and materiality of language and meaning production (featuring concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms). The title poem, Checking In, composed as a series of single-line faux Facebook updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture; and as a euphoric eruption of Alternative Facts or Fake News, is a satiric and playfully absurdist political commentary on U.S. politics. Each line erupts as a provocative self-reflexive mash-up that speaks to our ongoing desire for information while acknowledging how fraught with myth that information can be. Whether it’s Ornette Coleman flying Jazz, Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants, Immanuel Kant liking No Doubt, or bill bissett and Slavov Zizek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In takes the reader on a satiric tour through the shards and fragments of literary and post-consumerist culture. It reminds us that we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us; and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking. Through rhythmic oscillation, dissonant ambiance, and sonoric exuberance, Checking In forges a site of radical grafting linkages, codes, indeces, and ludic identities; it rhapsodically erupts as a hypertextual twining of both intimate and social space. And, as an interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, updates, analysis, echoes, and provocations, re-presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities; inter-subjective theaters of infinite reframing. A celebratory rhapsody, reminding us how the Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. Its data is absurd, and as such speaks to the way we seek answers, but with answers to questions that have never been asked. We seek fulfillment but enter an unbound, unsettling, uninhibited flow of information where every data point only refers back to itself and the culture of techno-capitalism of the Web; performing a kind of nekuia (as Susan Howe invoking Robert Duncan) says in Spontaneous Particulars) - a rite whereby the dead are made to speak again. Or for Joyce (in Finnegan’s Wake) - a commodius vicus of recirculation.
