Off Message

Author: Joel Brouwer

Publisher: Four Way Books (2016)

In meditations on everything from Marx to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without being preachy, these poems are unafraid to implicate themselves: like us, their speakers are part of the problem, and their struggles highlight the absurdities of broadband capitalism. What should we make of televised warfare, revitalized totalitarianism, and spectacular environmental degradation? Which pages should we highlight in our history books? Off Message wrestles with these questions by overlaying the near and the far, the lyric and encyclopedic. Each poem is a mixtape, an abandoned essay, a satire of modern conscience. Veering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster to Kasparov’s chess match against Deep Blue, they revel in the sights and sounds of information overload even as they yearn for knowledge and connection in our hyper-mediated present.