Alan Gilbert

The Treatment of Monuments Alan Gilbert

Poetry. THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS collects four long poems written in varying styles. The first poem in the book, Relative Heat Index, is a serial poem in twenty-three parts that attempts to capture the personal and political climate of the United States plunged by its leaders into war following the September 11 attacks. Influenced by Robert Hayden's Words in the Mourning Time and George Oppen's Of Being Numerous, which were similarly written during a decade of war and social upheaval, Relative Heat Index uses a fragmentary approach to speak the unspoken while also leaving spaces of silence to indicate the impossibility of fully capturing in a single poem the totality of war--domestic and abroad--and its devastations.

A sequence of propulsive poems best read in one sitting, Alan Gilbert's THE TREATMENT OF MONUMENTS harnesses what it describes as poetry's broken voice and puts it in the service of social critique and cultural elegy. Signaling the failure of history to point a way toward a future and the perceived inevitability of corruption's lasting win, the poems make a stand for a kind of protest, lest we be left 'scrubbing capital's bathroom / with a toothbrush and one shredded square of paper towel.' These are poems for the end times that know no end. They won't cheer you up, but they will keep you company in your rage, and just possibly light a fire under you--all while making you, occasionally, laugh. It's what happens when a poem takes corporate absurdity to its logical conclusion: 'First the legroom / is removed, then the legs.' And when questions with knowable answers--'How much force can a building withstand?' are bound to those without--'What are the conditions of knowledge?' or 'Where is the love?' The love is in a certain fearlessness, put better by Gilbert himself: 'No one hedges / their bets when the only outcome is loss.'--Anna Moschovakis