Felonies of Illusion

by Mark Wallace

Poetry. FELONIES OF ILLUSION is the newest offering of poems from poet Mark Wallace, whose previous titles include HAZE: ESSAYS POEMS PROSE and NOTHING HAPPENED AND BESIDES I WASN'T THERE. "A master at making genre question itself, Mark Wallace gets the square peg in the round hole again. A stark and aphoristic long poem about living and working during the war--direct, wise, and brave enough to skip the decorative--bumps up against the witty, clanging, angry, top-speed, palimpsestuous title series--lyrics that swallow their own tails. Wallace is cynical, clear-eyed, and resolutely jokey on commerce, war, love (the 'therapeutic use of commitment') and exhausted longing ('This day could be about today, leisurely and bright/if the days weren't stacked like nights inside it.') Nobody gets away with anything in FELONIES OF ILLUSION: we're all skewered until we grimace and grin"--Catherine Wagner.

Genres: Poetry

135 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2008

About the author

Mark Wallace was born in 1962 in Princeton, New Jersey and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. Between the ages of 8 and 17, with his father and brother he drove across the United States to Southern California on camping trips every summer, once going by way of Mexico City and once by way of Lake Banff, and he has spent time in all 48 of US mainland states.

The numerous bad jobs he has worked since the age of 15 are distinguished not by working class physical labor but by the low paid tedium of the contemporary world’s bureaucratic nightmare.

He received his Ph.D. from the State University at Buffalo with his dissertation The Gothic Universe in the Fiction of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. He worked at Buffalo as a student assistant to Charles Bernstein on "The Wednesdays At Four Plus" reading series.

Reviews

[Joe]

My first textual introduction to Mark Wallace. What I think of as DC Language at its most wry, constantly torquing the language of commerce, political commentary into new sentences, curious platitudes that read as spoken--

"any chance

of having your dreams downwind?
No one drowns to want anymore."

"regular or decaf death

on that stick?"

"We'll see who eats asbestos and soup
better on camera films a quitter
daily caught denying the party

no one registered part of"

Though this is more of a description of the final 100 pages of the book and not the first sequence--"The Long Republican Winter"--which is surprisingly direct in the face of ramping up of another war in the middle-east--

"it would be wise to want
nothing from the human world

let my wisdom fail me"