Juliana Spahr uses details to explore Hawai'i's politics of location and her own place in it as an outsider: a hard-core show where the singer shouts out fuck you-aloha-I love you over and over; the pidgin word 'da kine;' native Hawaiian rights to gathering; Palolo stream; the similarities and differences between hotel rooms and conference rooms; and acrobats at a Las Vegas-style floor show in Waikiki. Spahr is attentive to specifics and she draws from documentary poetics in these five interconnected poems that move between lyricism, rhythmic repetition, and explanatory prose. Conceptually provocative and yet moving at the same time, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You demands reading and re-reading.This book of documentary poetics is by an important up and coming female experimentalist.
“An understated, careful examination of the individual in the troubled nexus of the law, community, culture, and, centrally, language . . . continues [Spahr’s] search for the verbal means to realize others without resort to an identity-based voice. She succeeds brilliantly with ‘a younger man, an older man, and a woman,’ one of four long sequences here . . . [the] tension between the black heart of anger and faith in community makes this a distinct, ambitious book of poems.”—Publishers Weekly
“The more I read through Spahr’s work, the more interested I am in reading further, and deeper…”—Rob McLennan,Rob McLennan’s blog
JULIANA SPAHR is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu, and editor of the journal Chain. She is also the author of Response (1996), winner of the National Poetry Series Award and Reading Anarchies: Radical Experimentalism in Twentieth-Century American Literature (1999).“Juliana Spahr’s method bears some comparison to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is premised on a daringly aggressive ambivalence, one that is olă(
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