The Joyous Age

Author: Christopher Nealon

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2004)

"The playgrounds and basements of Brooklyn and Berkeley teem with neo-avant-something poets who smash prose sense to bits while preserving syntax, and who claim that the resulting jumbles reveal a radical critique of life, the universe, or old tennis shoes. Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast."

–Stephanie Burt