The Dance of No Hard Feelings

Mark Bibbins

In his second collection, The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Lambda Award winner Mark Bibbins pressures language into a performance of surprising, invigorating movements across syntax and line. Vulnerable yet suspicious and sharp-witted, he responds to a nation responsible for and besieged by a bankrupted presidency, employing concise lyrics and longer sequences while in the process inventing a new form, the exploded double haiku.
 
Incited by progressive blogs, ad campaigns, elegy, and Eros, Bibbins addresses environmental catastrophe and grotesque political posturing in our nascent millennium, as well as the corporate media’s willingness to front for the worst offenders as it both panders and condescends to audiences drunk on doublespeak. These are songs of passionate and ambivalence sung in a dark time.

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ISBN: 9781556592928

Format: Paperback

Sweetlips and Spangled Emperors

We lost the change that looking
makes: less juice in the sluice,
more tear in the where. Severed
 
boy-twin sits up, keeps going, offers
a sacrifice to news crews—
the dirt, the down, the dormant star.
 
We carved an elegy into a chunk
of soap, spelled another
with bodies on a hillside
 
until the usual twits came to warm
a hole in our iced-up lake, leaving
us hobbled and cheated of tongue,
 
where pain yet peaks under orchidy rain.
Quelles jolies, parentheses—we slow,
go slack as the water within.

About the Author

Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon: 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, …

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Reviews

“To say that Mark Bibbon’s second poetry collection offers evidence that the American apocalypse has already happened… might be an overstatement, but he’s deftly captured our current malaise.” —Boston Review

“Those who will feel themselves spoken for by these poems have been hungrily awaiting this book.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This is the book to read if you think poetry is Kerouac and Beowulf and Yeats yearning for a higher light. The higher light here is sparked and glows only in the dark.” —Bookslut

“… a wellspring of much that poetry is supposed to do… The Dance Of No Hard Feelings is distinguished by Bibbing’s odd-angled metaphors and his preference for choosing his own language instead of predictably pablum insights.” —Rain Taxi