Here Come the Warm Jets
Author: Alli Warren
Publisher: City Lights (2013)
Charged with swagger and sensuality, tenderness and cold fact, the 10th Spotlight series installment, Here Come the Warm Jets, is the brash debut volume by Bay Area poet Alli Warren. Taking its title from the Brian Eno classic, Jets jumbles gender, class and space-time perspectives into a chorus of contemporary idioms and lyrical longings. Against the daunting backdrop of contemporary political-economy, Warren launches her missives of desire, in writing that is at once raw and sly. From the Bishop of Worms to Flipper to E-40, nobody's safe from the easy virtuosity with which she makes language sing.
"Here Come the Warm Jets starts by cycling through swaths of factless job-voice before pitching an unfolding exuberant doom-diction through the book’s positively evil prosodic middle. Relative time, absolute time, ornery time, palpation time, and a kind of time I can’t name are all in play along the way. I think Warren’s end of capitalism would come with the richest planes of full life, but only the poems and their upending of the never-ending blossom hull make me think so."
–Anselm Berrigan
"When form and form’s fiancé come maundering Alli Warren will undo them both with tart prepositional gambits and the vagaries of fortune-telling and a fine poker-faced command of stagecraft itself. With nods to the congress of manners (and hat tips too to Brooks, Duncan, and others) Here Come the Warm Jets plays at neither checking nor abashing but chronicles what it just might be to be beyond the reach of any drama, any architecture. This is one heavenly book."
–C. S. Giscombe
“[She]’s one of those poets who, once you read her work, instantly becomes a necessity.”
–Ron Silliman
“Warren displays a serious commitment to delineating the multifarious registers of communication that collide into what we think of as culture.”
–Noah Eli Gordon
"Warren's first book of poems is highly self-reflective, interestingly interrogative, and a lot of fun."
–Booklist