Virgil and the Mountain Cat Poems [Paperback]

At once uncompromising and highly inventive, David Lau's poems are imbued with a musicality that lightens the dark undertones of spoliation and entropy. Many of the poems embody a nexus of interaction with historical events, films, modernist poetic texts, and works of artbut from this allusion and evocation, a multifarious voice emerges. In these pages, the electric linguistic experiment meets a new urban, postnatural poetics, one in which poetry is not just a play of signs and seemings but also a prismatic investigation of our contemporary order: Hurry up before our factory leaves. / The first column of the Freedom Tower / traduces its ensorcellment in the facade. Here is a poetry both deeply lyrical and resistant, a poetry relentless in its invention and its stance against the apathy of convention and consumption.

David Lauteaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cabrillo College. His poems have appeared inBoston Review, New Orleans Review, Wildlife,and other magazines.

Virgil and the Mountain Cat, David Lau's first book of poems, evokes the shattering of Western civilization (not its collapse, but the tense, apprehensive moment before the cracked vessel falls apart). What commanded trust now provokes a nihilistic retaliatory mischief-making poetic language, in which the only redemptive element, if there is one, is what Alain Badiou calls the 'engine' of excess in the greatest 20th century art, excess of the kind that allows for change, a revolution. Lau's high-voltage language is a measure of the passion of (and for) belief that has been lost. Lau is a remarkable young poet. Calvin Bedient, author ofCandy Necklace

It's after the end of the world, and David Lau is our last first poet of the future past. When words have nowhere left to go, they need a new Virgil to guide them sideways in time, to where they can become ferociously fractal as the cry of a mountain cat. The mlƒ*