Description
Book SynopsisIn Andrew Durbin's Mature Themes, texts flow in and out of media realities and consciousness like images on a Tumblr dashboard. He assays the controversies and topologies of public lives mired in sex, secrecy, and fame, where celebrity subjects and anonymous speakers bleed into one another, sharing the dreamy, often darkly funny space of a Hollywood. These poems pursue the other, secret realities that lurk in a pressurized empire, an earth, on the verge of collapse.
Trade Review“Mature Themes negatively embraces media culture in its dizzying vortex of self-reflexivity, where facts exist only as powered by dreams, and dreams are in fact, malignant intent. It's like that, like a cat chasing its tail. Durbin's incisive and often brilliant book offers pitch-perfect feedback of a culture where to go deep is to resend an unanswered text at 3 a.m.”—Chris Kraus
“Mature Themes is very good, but Andrew Durbin is going to die alone anyway. Not because he isn’t a very good lay, but because as it turns out, this book shows us how Andrew just can’t enjoy any luxury he seeks to accumulate. Basically, Mature Themes is a musical flood of dispassion seamlessly submerged in a paranoid post-internet takeover where any notoriety turns on living the nightmare dream. Here’s the thing—as Lauren Berlant writes, “sitting with the loss of the world requires a supple affective infrastructure, or a religion." Sometimes this is music, or art, or academia, or love. Andrew prefers not to be triangulated, which means the promiscuity of his work is also something that has to stretch and move and bend through this by already knowing it’s all over. And as it turns out, for Andrew, aesthetic disinterest, waning faith and terminal irony are not very good ways to find a nice Jewish girl or a homonormie partner. So he is probably going to die alone, but that’s OK, because who doesn't want a flirtatiously immovable attachment to an impossible position of doom? I’d hit it. I know you would.”—Trisha Low
