The Totality for Kids

Joshua Clover

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780520245990
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520939097
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between "the brutal red dream/Of the collective" and "the parade/Of the ideal citizen." The book's action takes place in these gaps, "dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream." The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern's excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Ceriserie
• Poem (We always send it to the wrong address)
• Early Style
• “Alas, that is the name of our town; I have been concealing it all this time”
• Baroque Parable
• Poem (I come across the paving stones)
• Blue’s 1900
• The Other Atelier
• Aeon Flux: June
• Auteur Theory
• Antwerp rainy all churches still haunted
• OMA
• A-Shaped Gate
• Rue des Blancs Manteaux
• In Jaufré Rudel’s Song
• No More Boffins
• Chreia
• Letters and Sodas
• French Narratives
• Ça ira
• Kantine
• Poem (We are bored in the city)
• The Dark Ages
• En Abyme
• “An archive of confessions, a genealogy of confessions”
• “Of the city of the dark . . .”
• Poem (Tired of people, I wanted the mail to come)
• Valiant en Abyme
• Feral floats the form in heaven and of light
• Parable Lestrange
• Poem (So I went out into the nervous system of the air—)
• Aporia
• A Boy’s Own Story
• Return to Rue des Blancs Manteaux
• Whiteread Walk
• Their Ambiguity
• Whiteread Walk
• For the Little Soldier
• Late Style
• Year Zero
• What’s American About American Poetry?
• At the Atelier Teleology
• Acknowledgments
• Index