FOR TRAPPED THINGS
by Brian Kim Stefans
For Trapped Things by Brian Kim Stefans collects poems written during our recent overlapping crises: environmental degradation, the dangerous election, the imposition of false freedoms by techno-capitalism, and the increasingly fraught relationship of the individual and the State. By turns fierce, funny, vulnerable, and elegiac, the poems engage both with traditional forms and meters as much as with recent developments in the “avant-grade.”
Sprinkled throughout the book are a meditative set of poems inspired by lines of Rilke, a group of satirical poems starting with lines by Walt Whitman, and a dizzying group of poems, “The Wild Body,” that draws on George Carlin as much as it does Friedrich Nietzsche (and many others!). Stefans’s perspective is global—as the first poem, “Overture,” establishes—while envisioning the subject as what, well, it is: “trapped” in a mesh of emotions, the body, and myriad relations.
People are Saying:
For Trapped Things, the latest poetry collection from polymath Brian Kim Stefans, is a dizzying slalom, taking off from Olympian slopes of literary genre and allusion, flying through uncanny valleys between exquisitely dissonant verses of an alienated artist-intellectual and the omnivorous media feed of a doom-scrolling pop culture futurist. The poet makes his hard bed, then lies in it, feeling the lumpy truth. – Harryette Mullen
There’s a lot of enlightened and purposeful vamping going on in this book. Lots of chatter and digital noise. A psychic turbulence trapped in endless news cycles, tweets, and posts, trapped in tradition, in form. Brian Kim Stefans is toughing it out for us, making art as the only recourse to the onslaught. I also like this books commitment to lyric utterance in order to depict reality, no matter how unstable, or precisely because it is unstable as the poet asks “Could it be the genius of the sky was a rumor?” – Peter Gizzi
If the crisis in U.S. poetics is a conjointment of two forces – 1, the centrifugal forces of political ideologies (scattering minds to the ends of their wits) and 2, centripetal forces, wherein amassments of poetic insights take flight, but in fixed circular orbits straining towards a moral or ethical center (but find no single core), then we can think of certain poets that evade being crushed by this Rude Tug and Tossing, just long enough to make New Sense, by way of a New Poetics as a resistance to these battered cultural landscapes we call Country. Stefan’s poems are actual updates on the way things bop & roll in our epoch. Already a master of making idiolects dance on the page, Stefans outdoes himself in this truly riveting collection. – Rodrigo Toscano
About the Author:
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, digital artist and theorist. His poetry publications include “Viva Miscegenation”, Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works and What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers. He translates in Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud and writes speculative literary criticism in Word Toys: Poetry and Technics. Links to his digital work, including “The Dreamlife of Letters,” are on arras.net. Stefans teaches in the English Department at UCLA.