The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of significationas if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

The Totality for Kids (New California Poetry)

Clover, Joshua

Reference

University of California Press

The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification―as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

The Totality for Kids (Volume 16) (New California Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as the end of history.” Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop music also experienced striking changes. Vividly conjuring cultural sensations and events, Clover tracks the emergence of seemingly disconnected phenomena--from grunge to acid house to gangsta rap--asking if ”perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility.” His analysis deftly moves among varied artists and genres including Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, De La Soul, The KLF, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, U2, Jesus Jones, the Scorpions, George Michael, Madonna, Roxette, and others. This elegantly written work, deliberately mirroring history as dialectical and ongoing, summons forth a new understanding of how history had come out to meet pop as something more than a fairytale, or something less. A truth, a way of being.”

1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About

Arts & Photography

Music

In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as “the end of history.” Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop music also experienced striking changes. Vividly conjuring cultural sensations and events, Clover tracks the emergence of seemingly disconnected phenomena--from grunge to acid house to gangsta rap--asking if ”perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility.” His analysis deftly moves among varied artists and genres including Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, De La Soul, The KLF, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, U2, Jesus Jones, the Scorpions, George Michael, Madonna, Roxette, and others. This elegantly written work, deliberately mirroring history as dialectical and ongoing, summons forth a new understanding of how “history had come out to meet pop as something more than a fairytale, or something less. A truth, a way of being.”

1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About

Humor & Entertainment

Madonna Anno Domini: Poems

Jorie Graham claims Clover's poetry as "a poetic manifesto as well as a prayer-book for the millennial generation." Winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the poetry collection says more about the state of art in American poetry than it illuminates its subject matter which deftly jumps from referencing death camps to Rodney King. The language is beautiful, delirious, a little hallucinatory, and so, finally, in love with itself that it fails to touch any one of its subjects deeply. Yes, profoundly postmodern, a virtual world of accidental information with very little understanding of knowledge's depths. Paper edition (unseen), $11.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Roadrunner (Singles)

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song "Roadrunner" captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates "Roadrunner" at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place--the American era that rock & roll signifies--that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

Duke University Press Books

Product Description 
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In 
Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world. 
 Review \n“ 
Roadrunner is a wonderful book: unique, passionate, sardonic, and as intellectually playful as it is rigorous. It is thrilling to be in the presence of a writer realizing all of his gifts—and yet he and the reader never lose sight of the song or cease to hear it. In that sense, Joshua Clover has not only realized himself as a writer; he has realized the song.” 
 -- Greil Marcus, author of ― 
The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs\n“ 
Roadrunner is incisive, poetic, and full of life, a beautifully circuitous meditation that mirrors how obsessive music fandom feels. Joshua Clover is in his finest critical form here.” 
 -- Jessica Hopper, author of ― 
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic\n"In this fascinating discursive journey, Clover discusses Boston-area car culture’s impact on the lyrics and music of 'Roadrunner' and other road and highway songs; he also laments social changes wrought by the emphasis on industrialization and, more recently, financialization, at the expense of substantive production. . . . Clover demonstrates a sweeping command of his material. . . ." 
 -- Barry Zaslow ― 
Library Journal Published On: 2021-07-01\n"In a brisk 100-plus pages, he pulls off a kind of critical jiujitsu, linking a song about driving past the Stop & Shop 'with the radio on' back to Chuck Berry's classic songs about riding along in an automobile, and forward to Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha' and M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' both of which reference 'Roadrunner.' . . . Like the song, Clover's lengthy essay steps on the gas from the on-ramp and keeps pushing." 
 -- James Sullivan ― 
Boston Globe Published On: 2021-09-07\n" 
Roadrunner, Clover's book, has plenty of warmth; in fact, it runs positively hot as the poet and cultural theorist veers off onto one exit ramp after another." 
 -- Jay Gabler ― 
The Current Published On: 2021-09-15\n"It’s heady stuff, for sure, but it’s also as ecstatic as the music it celebrates—an inspired, inspiring tribute to what Greil Marcus once called 'the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest.'" 
 -- Marc Hogan ― 
Pitchfork, Best Music Books of 2021 Published On: 2021-11-22 
 About the Author 
Joshua Clover is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, and author of 
Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings; 
1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About; and other books.

Award winning poet Joshua Clover theorises the riot as the form of the coming insurrection Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, this valuable history will help guide future antagonists in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon.

Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

History

World

Verso

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an "age of riots" as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet it was supplanted by age of the glorious strike and labour protests of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From, from the seventies on, we're seen a return of the strike - now changed along with the coordinates of race and class. From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Riot.Strike.Riot is a tour de force of political and theoretical analysis.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clover, Joshua. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Clover, Joshua

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clover, Joshua. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Totality for Kids (New California Poetry)

The Totality for Kids (Volume 16) (New California Poetry)

1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About

1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About

Madonna Anno Domini: Poems

Madonna Anno Domini: Poems

Roadrunner (Singles)

Roadrunner (Singles)

Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings