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Winter Editions, 2024, 312 pp.
“I fell in a hole while staring at my phone,” Alan Gilbert writes in “Neon Catastrophe,” “but the pratfalls started long before that.” This may be the appropriate pretext for moving through The Everyday Life of Design, a sprawling collection that navigates the cumulative absurdity of our postmodern entanglements, where our human questions of subjectivity are always shadowed by the farce of their commodity.
Gilbert’s collection oscillates seamlessly between the existential threats of production and the superfluous distractions numbing us to those very same threats, creating amusing tautologies of cause and effect. Brand names inundate these stanzas with the same relentless regularity they do our virtual space—now nearly indistinguishable from our reality in the Baudrillardian sense. The phone isn’t the direct cause of this schism, but a symptom. Gilbert is apt not to use the phone as a simplistic interpretation device, but rather as a vehicle to further examine the complexities of our predicament.
“We sign up to get lots of free stuff, / but still have to pay each day.” This moment is a sly indictment of the failed structural return on our continued investment—that nothing is truly free, and the allure of any “free” item provokes our inner consumer, making us vulnerable to a whole host of other problems: surveys we’re willing to answer, data we’re willing to share. The reader arrives at such conclusions not through prescripted prosody, but from piecing together Gilbert’s juxtapositions.
Here is the second stanza from “Flushing the Lungs”:
It’s not a metaphor, it’s an image,
as we watch through the pixels
collecting their own form of dust
next to Walt Disney’s head in a freezer
I only want to be revived if it
involves Alpine Breeze body wash
and a suture, the whoosh of traffic
in the distance. How many houses
will I never see again? I meant
to tell you about the dog, the lead
streaming through the pipes.
Gilbert focuses the reader’s attention not on interpreting a series of symbolic or subliminal meanings, but on attention to the thing. If this brings to mind the Williams maxim, “No ideas but in things,” good, it’s useful. The things in this stanza lead us to our image of a kind of post-consumer America, where the supposed ingenuity of capitalism has long lost its shine. Now, we wade through a carcinogenosphere (to borrow a phrase from Anne Boyer) of microplastics, toxins, and the amoral ubiquity of branded content. We live in the fallout of planned obsolescence.
The image of pixels gathering dust requires an impossible bend in the imagination, and yet it is also immediately conjured, as if the tracks have already been laid in our minds. The pixel is a unanimous point of reference, a controlling measurement of our lives, a unit of increasingly prolonged engagement. The fact that it gathers dust, or more importantly its “own form of dust,” suggests a kind of age and complacency—our sedentary lives mirrored in the dirty pixels through which we observe the simulacra of ourselves.
Still, amid the humorous image of Walt Disney’s cryogenic floating head, or a brand of body wash as an answer to an existential concern, Gilbert never misses an opportunity for a discerning approach. “After all that history, it’s come back / to a battle over water and land,” he says in the third stanza of “Flushing the Lungs.” A tragic recurrence has taken place right in front of us. This same battle, which systematically erased and exiled millions of indigenous peoples across the map of the Americas, the same land that was tilled and cultivated by those very same indigenous peoples, and later by enslaved men, women, and children, and later by the indentured servitude of prison labor and sharecroppers, and now is often maintained through the untenably low pay of immigrant workers, is not being fought over by and for the people but by the corporate sectors of American enterprise—another pipeline, another Amazon distribution center, another prison, another chain of restaurants and shopping centers.
Gilbert doesn’t have to name all of these things directly (although he addresses many of them) to evoke their claustrophobic presence in our daily experience. The land—already ruined by a culture of profit and production—remains a fungible commodity: bought and sold, razed and repaved, rebranded. And it doesn’t even stop there—corporate executives want to pay millions to flash advertisements in the fucking sky. If Gilbert’s poems instruct us in any kind of approach, it is perhaps to laugh to keep from crying.
The poems in The Everyday Life of Design illustrate the dystopian consequences of our constructed environment. “I dropped my phone in the ocean, / and now the fish play Candy Crush,” he says in “The Passenger.” If Suzanne Césaire’s Surrealism suggested her “permanent readiness for the Marvelous,” then perhaps Gilbert’s Surrealism suggests more a permanent readiness for the Ruinous. After all, it is the absurd influence of the product that gives these poems their detachment from the strictures of the Real, whether as a mode of displacement (a gaming app finding an unfathomable context in the ecological world, an algorithm with a biological constitution, a natural wonder interpellated through an avatar) or through the inconceivable lack felt in the interests of innovation: “They put the defibrillator in a pill, but it still won’t heal / our hearts.”
Supposing there was any lingering hope that the modal interventions of capitalism might deliver us, as a whole, into a brighter, more sustainable future, well, Gilbert’s poems are here to announce the ethical insolvency of that hope—or, not only are we totally, irrevocably fucked, but the severe degree to which we are fucked has already reshaped our ecology, our futurity, our reality. The poems in The Everyday Life of Design may not read immediately as threnody (they are, after all, funny), but their lamentations cannot be ignored—these are poems being written at the end of empire. Their problems are unique to our privilege of abundance—an abundance that has become a social deterioration.
“The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him,” Theodor W. Adorno writes in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. “Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him.” If Adorno’s work was a clarion call to galvanize the public into direct action against the full ideological influence of these cultural products, Gilbert’s poems are a dirge played on a slide whistle. We’ve so long accepted the schematics of our cultural manufacturers, they are indistinguishable from our social behaviors. The newspapers, films, and print media that Adorno was concerned about were, at least, fixed locations of engagement; these cultural products are now embedded in the pervasive technology of our cell phones, which monitor and curate our every nanosecond of engagement.
The image of a person swiping through the innumerable distractions of a cellular device (its battery life powered by the child cobalt miners in Congo) while meandering through a landfill of LED screens, DVDs, microwaves, and other expendable technologies (also manufactured through cheap, conscripted labor) is so banal to our experiences that we miss the indefatigable tragedy of this condition. We’ve missed the exit ramp to salvation. What else is there to do but lament our American brand of collapse? Gilbert’s poems lament this collapse with Carlinesque parrhesia—a truth we cannot turn away from, even as we laugh openly at our ineptitude, even as the laughter turns to tears.
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Eric Tyler Benick is a writer, editor, and educator based in Brooklyn. His poetry collections include the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and the forthcoming Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026). He is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He teaches postcolonial and anticarceral literatures at Wagner College where he is criminally adjunct and systematically defunded.
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