The Dance of No Hard Feelings

Author: Mark Bibbins

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2009)

In his second collection, The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Lambda Award–winner Mark Bibbins pressures language into a performance of surprising, invigorating movements across syntax and line. Vulnerable, yet suspicious and sharp-witted, he responds to a nation responsible for and besieged by a bankrupted presidency, employing concise lyrics and longer sequences while in the process inventing a new form, the exploded double haiku.

Incited by progressive blogs, ad campaigns, elegy, and Eros, Bibbins addresses environmental catastrophe and grotesque political posturing in our nascent millennium, as well as the corporate media's willingness to front for the worst offenders as it both panders and condescends to audiences drunk on doublespeak. These are songs of passionate and ambivalence sung in a dark time.

“Delirious! Adventure stories in the shape of poems.”

–Laurie Anderson

“Bibbins . . . has the courage to stop, to pin down the always irrational present moment, and the reader is eager to follow, to inhale its scathing or enticing perfume. . . . A brilliant young poet.”

–John Ashbery