Dog Day Economy

Author: Ted Rees

Publisher: Roof Books (2022)

The Poetry Project Newsletter lauds Ted Rees’ sense of “poignant militancy” as he “tarries with the ingestible grotesquery of the capitalist present” in ambitious and rowdy collections such as his latest, Dog Day Economy, available now from Roof Books.

He is a poet of resistance, yet Cam Scott writes, “this oppositional bearing never lapses into nihilism; quite the opposite, as Rees risks gratitude for a reality of someone else’s making, and a fraught world wanting change.”

Roof Books is proud to be working with one of Philadelphia’s most exciting writers, admired for his scruffily scrupulous perspicacity and grungy, scalding queer perspectives. In his newest release, the poet’s command of language burns hotter than “Houdini’s anger” as he brings us on a delirious yet painstaking tour of the contemporary American condition.

The poems of “Dog Day Scrolls” were first composed on large sheets of butcher paper with markers and tape. The poems in the section titled “Economy, a Reshaped Spit” were composed by writing with and around language that was physically cut and pasted from issues of The Economist and Wikipedia articles about mysterious disappearances suspected to be voluntary.

Dog Day Economy is a tenderly confrontational journey through punk textures, a phantasmagoria that positivizes cynicism as a tool against oppression. Rees’ earthy inventiveness recalls such New Narrative forebears as Kevin Killian and Kathy Acker, mixed well with the wistful, whiskey-drunk wit of the Mountain Goats. Dog Day Economy is a political bonfire inside an antique mall, sharp without forgoing lyricism, sentimental where it counts, but otherwise unsparingly incendiary. You won’t want to miss it.