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Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
A complex and multifaceted reckoning with literary and cultural lineage, Mike Lala’s The Unreal City locates our moment, and reimagines what we might make of it, by subjecting the history of literature to a radical détournement.
In The Unreal City Mike Lala struts through our contemporary wasteland—detritus of culture and commerce strewn everywhere, day’s minutiae grown Dionysiac, allusion rapt in a visionary elusiveness—with poems that outpace the difficult history they also confront.
–Dan Beachy-Quick
Mike Lala paints with the brush of epochs. Evoking a dappled synesthesia of melodies and movements. Guiding us through the visceral vertigo of a human among humans standing at the site of a collective impasse, our manmade abyss. The Unreal City is giving renaissance. The kind that might lead to actual enlightenment.
–Marwa Helal
A singularly accomplished and delightfully unruly poetics [that] takes many forms, each complicating and enriching the other. After all, a singular voice often necessitates new and exciting forms of discourse. The Unreal City is a masterful collection of poems.
–Kristina Marie Darling and Jeffrey Levine, Tupelo Press Editor’s Citation
Intricate and terrifying in its depiction of the present moment, even as it offers an alternative future.
–Publishers Weekly
For Lala, the city is ground zero for both the violence of history’s erasure and the deluge of its return. Cities, like poems, are at once bastions of unreality and a means to survive it; in its final pages, The Unreal City takes the shape of a directive to tip the balance of urban life toward the latter.
–Peter Myers, Rain Taxi Review of Books
These excoriations of our present urbanity are fiercely and unrelentingly political, ecological, and personal.
–Tyrone Williams, Full Stop
These sprawling poems feel like time travel. Inventive in all ways, Lala's staggering collection experiments with references and form.
–Jess Lee, Staff Pick, McNally Jackson Books
In these lyrical meditations crisscrossing the fields of personal, national, and international histories, strewn with bodies, Lala confronts, without flinching, the terrible beauties born of fin de siècle pessimism and optimism. We remain in the closet.
-Tyrone Williams, Colorado Prize for Poetry Judge's Citation
This is a remarkable book - sprawling, generous, angry, delicate. Through borrowed language and staged dialogues, Exit Theater asks how individual experiences of violence combine with myth to create the collective present, where we peer out from the "gun cabinet..." Lala's book tears open the velvet cushioning.
-Catherine Wagner
Exit Theater deals mystery and suspense. This poet is expert at revealing the personal alongside the public through a language that’s intimate, searching, and uniquely his.
-Yusef Komunyakaa
A marvel of genre-straining performances...a book that challenges and resists the vague accumulations of knowledge upon which regimes depend...that neither assumes nor denies your participation, but utterly exhausts it.
-Joe Fritsch, The Fanzine
Lala’s book manifests these cumulative senses of our time, the dull, buzzing inescapable ache that arises when the weapons have come off the stage and constitute the real, everywhere and nowhere.
-Paul Jaussen, Jacket2
Lala merges verse, academic text, and lyric essay with writing for the stage in an elegiac debut collection meant to be beheld and enacted. This provocative book is designed as an immersive experience...poetry only in that it announces itself as such: this is performance, myth creation, and rally cry. In his understated confrontations with forms of societal violence - militarism, climate change, economic collapse - Lala attends to the musicality of language, seductively contrasting the lush with the sparse. Throughout, visual disjunctions and negative space wield tremendous power. A dense and challenging yet rewarding read.
-Publishers Weekly
Pulling the hair of the stars down to earth.
from her hand to the crook of his arm, in his bed,
I looked happy—I looked ready to be looked at.
someone called the present the future
by the star, and the night and the loop,
See that six?
Leaks drip out of lips that part, from a copse where secrets rot.
The I in Intervention inverts into an I.
Currency, my master of hours.
Nine cut roses on a table, left to right, beneath the Cherry Blossom.
I think it was something to do with labor.
—pink, like it used to be. Pink sliding into orange
[No photography.]
And if no one really hears through the news of the day,
Say goodbye, microphone. Try, but do not speak.
glance of the terminal// image of oil
here to dismantle/ letter & symbol
You were there.