"Unapologetically Vocational & Necessary"

Today I'm rolling my occasional Elective Affinities check-in (meaning: check it out) into a heads up about the new installment over at Thom Donovan and Participants' Others Letters. EA features David Brazil this week--among several really outstanding contributors in the past month and more since I wrote about the journal. Brazil, from "Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour":

sk for bread of what's to come,

"the world is coming to an

end & no one cares,"

vide second epigraph, American

Psycho, also Talking Heads.

I love, among other things, David's use of heavy enjambment here. The words otherwise spare form line parts that sear on follow-thru. Plus there's DB's collision of the allegorical with, sure, the pop-iconographic, but more than that--synthesized, references bring us smack into a present tense, where objects get their auras back, or in any case become subjective and wrapped up in a relation between ethics and memory. Which is what, in part, the fantastic Alli Warren-DB correspondence touches on, with Warren's simple but totally important question about the function or use of poetry-preoccupation is in a time of social-political catastrophe, setting in motion a rich, long response from DB. Check out the materials via the links above.