The Everyday Life of Design

Alan Gilbert

Bleak, absurd, elegiac, and politically incisive, Alan Gilbert’s sprawling epic poem is a document of these broken times, with a glint of hope for a better tomorrow. The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices. Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes while trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit precarious spaces while also seeking to elude them. Building on the legacies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Anne Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy, and Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy for the four elements, Gilbert’s project grows over time with additional poems, rearrangements, and revisions. The present 300+ page volume represents the second revised and expanded iteration of Gilbert’s ongoing magnum opus.

'The accuracy of these poems makes us their bull's-eye, their dense mystery not just in each poem but in each line. A line, just a line here, is an entire poem's worth of discernment, which is to say something new gets planted in us for a clarity that only the spontaneity of a genius poet like Alan Gilbert can provide. I am always grateful for such a collection, a book to keep for life.' - CAConrad

'These poems wander around in the outskirts of late capitalism, moving from one room to the next, noticing all the connections, such as how the raccoons move in before the arrival of Abercrombie & Fitch, while also never forgetting that “we’re on the verge of extinction.” They are transformative, funny, and often heartbreaking.' - Juliana Spahr