Viva Miscegenation

Stefans has long enjoyed attention in what might still be called the avant-garde, for his harsh, satirical collage-like verse and for his writings about poetry and new media. This first full-length collection since Stefans’s move from New York to UCLA will renew that attention, and ought to expand it: it’s funnier, stranger and more open than his works so far. Stefans arranges this big collection as if it were a set of chapbooks, with the first section, full of sestinas and sonnets, mocking and reinventing traditional forms: “Pastiche, pretense, parody/ are volleyed back and forth/ silently,” Stefans explains, envisioning readers “buried under the sand in your own inscrutable consequence.” At once sarcastic and friendly, cosmopolitan and capable of surprise, Stefans’s manner recalls Australia’s postmodern master John Tranter, or the English radical poet John Wilkinson. Later segments, at their best, consider Stefans’s move to Los Angeles, “blessed/ by the striations/ of traffic,” where “Practiced avoidance lacks the air of discipline,” or pay coded, punning tributes to institutions (such as the Believer magazine), to frenemies and friends. Less successful pages (including the concluding absurdist playlet) take their cues from the movement called Flarf, in which kitsch, awkwardness, even toilet humor constitute a tongue-in-cheek critique of capitalism: “I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,/ it was getting kind of crazy.” Yet there are emotions behind these strange works, too, from fear of commitment to anxiety over nihilism. (May)