DOG DAY ECONOMY
by Ted Rees
The Poetry Project Newsletter lauds Ted Rees’ sense of “poignant militancy” as he “tarries with the ingestible grotesquery of the capitalist present” in ambitious and rowdy collections such as his latest, Dog Day Economy, available now from Roof Books.
He is a poet of resistance, yet Cam Scott writes, “this oppositional bearing never lapses into nihilism; quite the opposite, as Rees risks gratitude for a reality of someone else’s making, and a fraught world wanting change.”
Roof Books is proud to be working with one of Philadelphia’s most exciting writers, admired for his scruffily scrupulous perspicacity and grungy, scalding queer perspectives. In his newest release, the poet’s command of language burns hotter than “Houdini’s anger” as he brings us on a delirious yet painstaking tour of the contemporary American condition.
The poems of “Dog Day Scrolls” were first composed on large sheets of butcher paper with markers and tape. The poems in the section titled “Economy, a Reshaped Spit” were composed by writing with and around language that was physically cut and pasted from issues of The Economist and Wikipedia articles about mysterious disappearances suspected to be voluntary.
Dog Day Economy is a tenderly confrontational journey through punk textures, a phantasmagoria that positivizes cynicism as a tool against oppression. Rees’ earthy inventiveness recalls such New Narrative forebears as Kevin Killian and Kathy Acker, mixed well with the wistful, whiskey-drunk wit of the Mountain Goats. Dog Day Economy is a political bonfire inside an antique mall, sharp without forgoing lyricism, sentimental where it counts, but otherwise unsparingly incendiary. You won’t want to miss it.
People are saying:
“Vocabularies of decaying presence and economic despair tumble together in Ted Rees’ 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 the desert:/polite way to say/we were seeing nought but mayhem/in each other’s viscera.”
– Robert Glück (Margery Kempe)
“Every poem here is a keloid: a scar that grows larger and wider than the original injury, the injury of language. Decades from now, fools are going to be like, ‘Why doesn’t anyone write poems like Ted Rees did in the early 20s?’ (Answer: no one writes poetry like Ted does, and judging from his helter-skelter methods, even he didn’t.)””
– Clint Burnham (The Only Poetry that Matters)
“Reading Ted Rees’ Dog Day Economy is like trying to treat a splinter. Its shredded particulars have us attending to something not-quite-surface, not-quite depth, deciphering the strangeness of one physicality lodged in another. There are intensive poems rather than extensive ones—a weirdly ambient oasis-depot where devastation can humor you and vice versa. Anti-cathartic, pastoral, political, abject, at times romantic, at times delicately cramped, Dog Day Economy proves T.S. Eliot’s theory that some sensibilities are simply capable of devouring any kind of experience.”
– Jennifer Soong (Near, At)
The Author:
Ted Rees is a poet, essayist, and editor who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent book of poetry, Thanksgiving: a Poem, was a finalist for a 2021 Lambda Literary Award. His first book was In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame and chapbooks include the soft abyss, The New Anchorage, and Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought.The Elephants.