Description
Book SynopsisIn the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry.
Trade Review"Look twice to find, in these curio-cabinet stanzas, a 'humble host / of green syllables familiarly / Englished.' Sample flint jelly among 'the lists of things,' where 'The Leaf' becomes a page and 'Root' an etymology. Let Jason Camlot's deft subtraction from Victorian classics yield a world of difference now." Herbert F. Tucker, author of Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790–1910
"Knowing that our greatest passions reveal our greatest vulnerability, Jason Camlot has written an extravagant and erudite Victorian love letter that doubles as a goofball twenty-first-century parody. I love this book! Intelligent, strange, diligent, and frivolous, Vlarf is both sublime and ridiculous. It's also moving and unforgettable." Stephanie Bolster, author of A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
"In Vlarf, Jason Camlot mines cultural memories to uncover some of the Victorian delights that first kicked our ecological crisis into high gear. Through kitsch experimentation and gleeful nonsense, his poetry brings historical perspectives in contact with our own messed-up world, evoking a melancholy nostalgia for a joy that's as dangerous as it is eye-opening." Dennis Denisoff, co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
