I, Boombox

Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English.

Robert Glück’s new book I, Boombox is a long poem fashioned from the author’s misreadings. In that sense, it’s a queer autobiography in which Glück dreams on the page.

“Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God’s laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film, and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes.”–Lisa Robertson

“In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the ‘umbilical/indescribabilia’ that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the ‘invisible speakers’ that populate Glück’s poem–their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies–turn dream’s content into poetic foam. In this mind’s eye–the ‘suburb’ is blithely rendered into a thing ‘superb, ‘ and ‘loneliness’ roars with the face of a ‘lioness /and intimacy.’ I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless–and this is a delight to understand.”–Shiv Kotecha

Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.