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| Whenever I read Jerome Sala, I feel like I'm the company of the perfect writer. He's a brilliant tactitian, a worldly thinker, a sublime fuss budget, the sweetest bully in contemporary lit, and a peerless maestro of comedic tone. Literate America, bow before our king." —Dennis Cooper |
| When they finally turn TV over to the poets to run, Jerome Sala will rule. In order to Look Slimmer Instantly!, one holds one’s nose, dives headfirst into the muck of US culture, and writes “Variations on a Theme by Subaru,” a poem in the form of a commercial film treatment: “And in the end/with an absence of marketing/glamour about the poem/ Shot of Barnes & Nobles Bookstore Exploding.” Here, sans apologies, Williams is rewrit: “so much depends/upon//a pure crystal/Baccarat® elephant ($459.00)//on the dark blue cover of/The Official Catalog//of Republican Memorabilia/beside the//Ronald Reagan teacup/($39.95).” Here is the first Ode To Vicodin, and, for your inner lobster, some minus sign shades and a serving of the hamburger helper of self-consciousness. The Horrific Triumph of Capitalism gets rock’n’rolled till gems shake out, not as fodder for the Home Shopping Club, but nutrition in the form of hope. Look Slimmer Instantly! promises everything and then reveals the manipulation and propaganda techniques that unmask those promises. Pay attention to that Man behind the Curtain! It’s Jerome Sala, who, midst cynicism and ennui, deflates the dark side with raw vision and berserker humor, thank goodness, a new equation for fresh poetry. —Bob Holman |
Jerome knows America.
Is that such a joke?
He knows poetry,
advertising, and
like evil puppets
on his knee they
talk such talk. Buy
this book, give it for
Christmas, any Christmas,
Read Jerome's work. He gets it.
This thing that we're in.
—Eileen Myles | |
Look Slimmer Instantly!
Jerome Sala
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| Paper | 6.5" x 7.5" | 128 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-72-7 | List: $13.95 | 06/1/2005 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Poetry is often thought of as a way to escape our blatantly commercial, media-ridden matrix of a world. But what if it turns out that poetry itself is just another media effect?
Sala’s poems explore this scary idea by feeding off the very media they critique. And in doing so, they make a discovery – that even our most mundane and oppressive ideologies are infected with the poetic.
Look Slimmer Instantly! covers a terrain that doesn’t often appear in poetry – from the worship of money, to the erotics of patriotism, to the profundities achieved by bad taste. On stage in this book, you’ll find apocalyptic allegories, the existential musings of porn stars, the deconstructive fury of self-help books – not to mention a glimpse of what poetry will look like when the genre acquires its first major ad campaign. Never above his material, the author’s tone throughout is gleefully crass, vulgar and nasty.
Sala was once praised as an "honorable hysteric" by poet/critic Peter Schjeldahl. This new book takes his provocations one step further, and offers entertainment, and poetry, of a high order.
About the author: Jerome Sala was born in Chicago. During his early career as a writer, he helped pioneer performance poetry in Chicago, participating in poetry competitions in boxing rings – that are said to have inspired the Slam (which occurred several years later). He was, in fact, one of the first “World Heavyweight Champions” of poetry. Additionally, along with poet Elaine Equi, he was connected with a punk poetry scene originating out of LA, and gathered in Dennis Cooper’s anthology of the early 80s: Coming Attractions. From these roots, Sala’s work continued to develop – exploring the connections between the pop and the poetic, the high and the low, the ironic and the political – all the while maintaining a healthy dadaistic suspicion of all things literary.
From the book:
"Variations on a Theme by Charles Barkley"
A poet is not a role model.
So this poem won't
make you rich like me.
It won't make you
rebound like me.
It definitely won't make
you handsome like me.
It will only let you read
a poem the people at Nike
would have written for me
if I were a poet
I'm not a poet. Period.
Now that's all
they wanted me to say. |
