Look Slimmer Instantly! Poems

by Sala, Jerome

• ISBN13: 9781932360721
• ISBN10: 1932360727
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-07-06
• Publisher: Soft Skull

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Jerome Sala is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Corporations Are People Too! and The Cheapskates. His other books include Look Slimmer Instantly, Raw Deal: New and Selected Poems, The Trip, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, and Spaz Attack. He lives in New York with his wife, poet Elaine Equi.

Table of Contents

God Bless America	p. 13
This Just In	p. 14
Variations on a Theme	p. 16
I'm with the Bland	p. 17
On Money and Bullshit	p. 18
Shopping for Underwear on a Saturday Morning	p. 19
Radiant Elephant	p. 21
A Pageant of Agents	p. 22
A History of White People	p. 24
Look Slimmer Instantly!	p. 25
Media Effects	p. 26
Variations on a Theme by Suburu	p. 27
Scenes from The Dick Van Dyke Show	p. 29
The Entrepreneurs	p. 41
Juice	p. 42
The Food of Love	p. 43
What I Learned at Harvard and Yale	p. 45
So Exact a Treament	p. 46
The Measure of Genius	p. 47
Dinner Conversation	p. 48
The Noose	p. 50
Vicodin	p. 52
The Mute Griefer	p. 53
The Interpretation of Screams	p. 56
And the Winner Is...	p. 58
Not That Innocent	p. 59
Of Being Singular	p. 60
Expose	p. 62
Meditation #8	p. 64
At Night on the Subway	p. 65
No Collar	p. 67
Lunch at the China Grill	p. 68
What I Learned at Ponderosa	p. 69
The New School Catalog	p. 70
Let the Creator Beware	p. 72
Class of '77	p. 73
The Martyrs	p. 78
I Saw It on TV	p. 79
A Man and a Woman	p. 81
Constant Comment	p. 83
The Nordic Track	p. 84
The Joy of Bread	p. 85
Standing in Form	p. 86
Destiny's Children	p. 87
Bad Books I Would Most Like to Read	p. 89
The Self-Help Teacher	p. 94
That Year	p. 99
It Was the Night before Monday	p. 101
The Moon Was Wondering	p. 103
Sorry	p. 104
Greyhound Theme Park	p. 106
The Alienation of Alienation	p. 107
Hollywood Alphabet	p. 109
Teenage Caveman, or A B-Class Movie Containing History	p. 111
Song of a Bug	p. 113
Invasion of the Invisibles	p. 114
How to Know Higher Worlds	p. 117
On Pain and Gain	p. 119
On Means and Ends	p. 124
The Animals Vs. the Humans	p. 125
My One and Only	p. 126
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