SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE BY SAMUEL SOLOMON
Examining traces of family history in FBI files and anti-communist congressional hearings, Special Subcommittee questions the revolutionary legacy we inherit from the 20th century. Against the American subcommittees of organized repression, Solomon invents a committed lyric of queer and un-American communist relation, filling the void left by the state’s redactions and the sentimental machinery of family history with best friends, rants, jokes, doggerel, and at least one threesome.
Born in New York City, Samuel Solomon is author of Life of Riley (Bad Press 2012) and translator, with Jennifer Kronovet and Faith Jones, of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014). He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sussex where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.
Excerpt
File affidavit for the report board.
This is total admin people –
strike items from speech, rights from legal
meetings, claim items for law, strike
didactic anti-labor time is stricken.
Court reporters for the aristocracy of labor
want us to know the difference
between 7am and 9am between straight
time and overtime is the real opposite of straight
time not queer time but alien physics.
If you work part time you cannot be
excused from service, right, you can’t
be most emphatic about everything –
December 12, 2017
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1934639238| 80 pages
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The smash and clash of discourses buzz across these fully occupied pages, from rant to camp, from sotto voce to shout in the street, where “Every good poem is a transitional demand.” They come in from the parks and off the screens, but not without lyric shelters deeply earned. These are voices, many and singular, that are urgent to be heard. Listen in.
—David Lloyd
In this series of red shouts, misremembered lyrics and culture skimmings, Samuel Solomon offers a poetics of conviction: language bumped and rigorous, tampered by gavels but still boisterous in ‘the shadow of our right’. ‘These are not tactics raised to principles. / Every good poem is a transitional demand’. Taken as a set of analects ‘in the interest of positions sometimes happy’, Solomon’s Life of Riley offers both a serious engagement with the ludicrous what-is and a flicker of its opposite: resisting eviction from public space, the territorialism of capital, and the plunge out of affect into the trap of concepts, these are poems to lean on.
—Andrea Brady
