Late in the Antenna Fields
Alan Gilbert
“Alan Gilbert is the tough-love chronicler of our immense dystopia, a huge role for a poet, and his antennae are tuned high as he receives and mirrors back this hungry ghost realm in a tight, vivid, kinetic, and elegant line. An enormous achievement. I ached and moaned, grew heartsick then laughed, often needing to pause and recover, but I couldn’t put this book down.”
—Anne Waldman
“Alan Gilbert’s powerful first collection reads like a verbal superconductor collider wherein the intractable litter of our times careens through dark space, indifferent to our need to pause or reflect; an additive slippage disintegrates the status quo. Gilbert has both the wit and stamina to forge this whizzing riptide, in which certain deep currents persist: toxins of mediated life, erosion of historical ground, sorrows of the heart.”
—Ann Lauterbach
“Against the technocracy that minimizes experience to record keeping, Alan Gilbert has written a physical history of untimely desires in the regulating ether: 'Sometimes the wounded land softly and sometimes with a thud.” A sensuous reaching, now comic, now cruel, emerges from a hostile environment of deficient claims and redirected certainties. These poems are bracing apologies for wanting more.”
—Roberto Tejada
“Populated by the separate impressions that fill a day, these poems are continually interrupted by episodes of pop metaphor and wry remarks keeping bad faith at bay. If the practice of poetry for many still tends to be an art of teasing out the subconscious in the guise of authenticity, Alan Gilbert, in his ambition and technique, does infinitely more for readers by pretending to do something less. As he writes, with deceptive simplicity, ‘My dreams tend to be literal.’ ”
—Tim Griffin
About the Author
Alan Gilbert is the author of two books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts) and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem), as well as a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press). His poems have appeared in The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and The Nation, among other places. His writings on poetry and art have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, BOMB, Bookforum, Cabinet, HTMLGIANT, Modern Painters, Parkett, and The Village Voice. He has contributed art catalogue essays and entries for a number of biennials, group shows, and solo exhibitions. He is the recipient of a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Cooper Union, and the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. He lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews and Press
Dale Smith, “Antenna openings: A review of Late in the Antenna Fields.” Jacket2
Laura Carter, “The Fragments of the Frame: On Alan Gilbert’s Late in the Antenna Fields.” Fanzine
Audio response to Late in the Antenna Fields by Sawako Nakayasu
“Alan Gilbert is the tough-love chronicler of our immense dystopia, a huge role for a poet, and his antennae are tuned high as he receives and mirrors back this hungry ghost realm in a tight, vivid, kinetic, and elegant line. An enormous achievement. I ached and moaned, grew heartsick then laughed, often needing to pause and recover, but I couldn’t put this book down.”
—Anne Waldman
“Alan Gilbert’s powerful first collection reads like a verbal superconductor collider wherein the intractable litter of our times careens through dark space, indifferent to our need to pause or reflect; an additive slippage disintegrates the status quo. Gilbert has both the wit and stamina to forge this whizzing riptide, in which certain deep currents persist: toxins of mediated life, erosion of historical ground, sorrows of the heart.”
—Ann Lauterbach
“Against the technocracy that minimizes experience to record keeping, Alan Gilbert has written a physical history of untimely desires in the regulating ether: 'Sometimes the wounded land softly and sometimes with a thud.” A sensuous reaching, now comic, now cruel, emerges from a hostile environment of deficient claims and redirected certainties. These poems are bracing apologies for wanting more.”
—Roberto Tejada
“Populated by the separate impressions that fill a day, these poems are continually interrupted by episodes of pop metaphor and wry remarks keeping bad faith at bay. If the practice of poetry for many still tends to be an art of teasing out the subconscious in the guise of authenticity, Alan Gilbert, in his ambition and technique, does infinitely more for readers by pretending to do something less. As he writes, with deceptive simplicity, ‘My dreams tend to be literal.’ ”
—Tim Griffin
About the Author
Alan Gilbert is the author of two books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts) and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem), as well as a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press). His poems have appeared in The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and The Nation, among other places. His writings on poetry and art have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, BOMB, Bookforum, Cabinet, HTMLGIANT, Modern Painters, Parkett, and The Village Voice. He has contributed art catalogue essays and entries for a number of biennials, group shows, and solo exhibitions. He is the recipient of a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Cooper Union, and the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. He lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews and Press
Dale Smith, “Antenna openings: A review of Late in the Antenna Fields.” Jacket2
Laura Carter, “The Fragments of the Frame: On Alan Gilbert’s Late in the Antenna Fields.” Fanzine
Audio response to Late in the Antenna Fields by Sawako Nakayasu
