Poetry. "A paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful DISASTER SUITES into motion. They produce a music--'missing in the count now counts as one'--reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it audible: war, so-called natural catastrophe, a 'public sphere where there is no / Public.' As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present--which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster's lyric 'I' summons its own kind of 'counting' (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard--'the drowned and the bombed'--in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays down: the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, shit, fuck, and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again"--Sianne Ngai.

Disaster Suites

Literature & Fiction

Halpern, Rob

Poetry

Palm Press

Poetry. "SNOW SENSITIVE SKIN is our most comprehensive document of poetics and poetry on both the 'state' and the coming-into-event of wartime since Ground Work and Trilogy, which is to say it resurrects the necessarily incomplete project of Leaves of Grass. Herein is the residue and legacy of Calamus, Drum-Taps, Driftwood, Songs of Parting and more. Herein is Halpern and Brady at their finest analytical, ethical and aesthetic pitch"—Tyrone Williams.

Snow Sensitive Skin

Brady, Taylor

Displaced Press

Taking Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor.

Music for Porn

Nightboat Books

About the Author\nRob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Yspilanti, Michigan, where he organizes the Writers' Bloc Poetry Workshop inside Women's Huron Valley Prison, while teaching at Eastern Michigan University. His books include include HIEROGLYPHS OF THE INVERTED WORLD (Kenning Editions, 2021), WEAK LINK (Atelos, 2019), COMMON PLACE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and MUSIC FOR PORN (Nightboat Books, 2012). Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, he co-edited From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (Contemporary Practice), which was listed among Entropy's "Best Non-Fiction" books of 2017. Halpern's critical and lyrical essays appear in Mediations, Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, and Chicago Review, as well as the edited volumes Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, and Political Poetics: Poetry and Communism. He is the editor of Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays (Nightboat, 2020).\nPoems of investigation, analysis and healing from poet, critic, editor and activist Rob Halpern. 
Rob Halpern's new sequence of poems speaks to social, environmental, and personal crisis--from white supremacist violence and wildfires raging just north of San Francisco, to the death of his father--all of which are tempered by the joyful birth of his daughter, whose new life offers relief in the darkness. He calls the poems "hieroglyphs" with a tip of the hat to Marx, for whom the "hieroglyphic" appearance of the world translates "the secret" of our catastrophe. But as Halpern notes, "the secret of the thing may well be that there is no secret." Here, investigation, analysis, and healing converge, as HIEROGLYPHS OF THE INVERTED WORLD tests the promise and the failure of cultural production, specifically lyric poetry, in the midst of disaster. In his afterword to the book, Halpern asks, "Can the moment arrested by the poem's burnished amber show us something we don't already know about the world?" And if not, what is the social function of the poem? Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but this book attempts a response. 
Poetry. California Interest. LGBTQIA Studies.\nBook Description\nPoems of investigation, analysis and healing from poet, critic, editor and activist Rob Halpern.

Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World

Kenning Editions

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. WEAK LINK is an interstitial work containing poems, poem-essays, prose sequences, letters, translations, exercises, and manifestos. Everything collected in it has been recovered from the faults and cracks within and between four books--RUMORED PLACE, DISASTER SUITES, MUSIC FOR PORN and COMMON PLACE--which together comprise one long serial work. No book can ever contain itself, so while the work included in WEAK LINK has not been moored to any of the aforementioned titles, it remains integral to the larger canvass this work exceeds. A critical essay on WEAK LINK's title sequence, called "Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A Reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link," by John Wilkinson, appeared in Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 2010).

Weak Link

Atelos

Winner of: Herald Scotland Books of the Year The poems included in this volume are drawn from Rob Halpern’s four collections and two chapbooks—Common Place, Disaster Suites, Imaginary Politics, Music for Porn, Rumored Place, and Weak Link—one long writing project for which [ –——–– ] stands here in lieu of a proper title. The writing collected under the sign of this placeholder expresses the most painful desires whose explicit objects are the figures of the wounded U.S. soldier and the Guantanamo detainee. It’s in these wrecked bodies that Halpern seeks the possibility of a truly unconditional love, at once prohibited and revolutionary.

[––––––––]: Placeholder

Enitharmon Press

Poetry. LGBT Studies. COMMON PLACE continues Halpern's sustained inquiry into the relations of body and voice to relentless militarization and economic depredation. Written in enjambed verses and impacted prose, Halpern's language is at once raw and sculpted, passionate, and analytic.

Common Place

Ugly Duckling Presse

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

Books by Halpern, Rob