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Fantasy
Poetry. Ben Fama's FANTASY operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama's language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one's own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.
"How did Fama invent a tone so perfect and icy, so equal to our times?"€"Wayne Koestenbaum
"Sometimes something gets written and it surprises you, though it feels familiar. An early- twenty-first century decadence with its adderalls. Still the colloquials and the coteries of the New York School, but now with selfies, with crying selfies even. And klout scores. And there is fashion week, the Miami, the Los Angeles. Tans. Pools. I read FANTASY again and again, thinking I could learn to recite its spell on my own. It is a book about an end. An end of our economic empire. Of the fantastical expansion of income. And the poems here just keep going. They keep going to work. They plan what to do when one encounters an active shooter situation. Sort of. Because there is no plan really that makes sense except maybe to keep showing up to work stoned."€"Juliana Spahr
"Fama has many faces, and fame comes in many sorts and sizes€"from the one- week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name (I may be quoting), i.e., Ana¯s Nin commiserates with Trent Reznor about the fact that Kate Moss's tan lines are, right now, more famous than either one of them. FANTASY is a Zipcar to cruise by such commiseration on the way to a resort Google maps can't locate, but that "if you can't afford it," at least you can "affect it," and there's still "Glamour all night."€"Bruce Hainley