“Warren’s first book of poems is highly self-reflective, interestingly interrogative, and a lot of fun.”–Booklist
Charged with swagger and sensuality, tenderness and cold fact, the 10th Spotlight series installment, Here Come the Warm Jets, is the brash debut volume by Bay Area poet Alli Warren. Taking its title from the Brian Eno classic, Jets jumbles gender, class and space-time perspectives into a chorus of contemporary idioms and lyrical longings. Against the daunting backdrop of contemporary political-economy, Warren launches her missives of desire, in writing that is at once raw and sly. From the Bishop of Worms to Flipper to E-40, nobody’s safe from the easy virtuosity with which she makes language sing.
The collection is a finalist for the 2014 California Book Award.
About the Spotlights Series:
City Lights Spotlight hopes to shine a light on the wealth of innovative American poetry being written today. We intend to publish accomplished figures known in the poetry community as well as young emerging poets, using the cultural visibility of City Lights to bring their work to a wider audience. In doing so, we also seek to draw attention to those small presses publishing such authors. As City Lights founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote, “If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics . . . to create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your voice.”
Praise for Here Come the Warm Jets:
“The 10th in City Lights’ ‘Spotlight Series, ‘ poet Alli Warren’s first book is anthemic, both wry and full of wonder, colloquial and lyrical and glittering with revelations. [It] upends contemporary syntax for the sake of self-expansion, moving seamlessly between edification and amused, tongue-in-cheek condemnation.”–San Francisco Weekly
“Here Come the Warm Jets starts by cycling through swaths of factless job-voice before pitching an unfolding exuberant doom-diction through the book’s positively evil prosodic middle. Relative time, absolute time, ornery time, palpation time, and a kind of time I can’t name are all in play along the way. I think Warren’s end of capitalism would come with the richest planes of full life, but only the poems and their upending of the never-ending blossom hull make me think so.”–Anselm Berrigan
“When form and form’s fiancé come maundering Alli Warren will undo them both with tart prepositional gambits and the vagaries of fortune-telling and a fine poker-faced command of stagecraft itself. With nods to the congress of manners (and hat tips too to Brooks, Duncan, and others) Here Come the Warm Jets plays at neither checking nor abashing but chronicles what it just might be to be beyond the reach of any drama, any architecture. This is one heavenly book.”–C. S. Giscombe
“Though she may be excoriating the system, Warren has fun doing it, however, with a willingness to always go for a dirty joke . . . This dead-pan tone belies the slyly crafted humor of her wordplay, which mashes up multiple registers for comic, sometimes cutting effect . . . Even as Warren’s poems dance away from any notion of a fixed self . . . a tender undercurrent runs throughout, and the closing ‘Personal Poem’–comprising a series of second-person commands–offers a roundabout glimpse into the poet’s more quotidian inspirations, while offering some sage advice: ‘Don’t talk too much about language in mixed company.'”–American Poets
Praise for Alli Warren:
“[She]’s one of those poets who, once you read her work, instantly becomes a necessity.”–Ron Silliman
“Warren displays a serious commitment to delineating the multifarious registers of communication that collide into what we think of as culture.”–Noah Eli Gordon
