Our Dark Academia

Title: Our Dark Academia
Author: Adrienne Raphel
ISBN: 9781734831641
Publisher: Rescue Press
Published: 2022
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

Poetry 1474360

Publisher Description:

Yes you, you chose to carve out this moment for you. No one else gets this time just for you, chirps the onscreen calisthenic coach. It's midnight. OUR DARK ACADEMIA's contingent academic anti-heroine is perpetually working, trying to work it out. She's lonely but onscreen. I don't feel anything at all it is so fun to be alive!she lies. Meanwhile, is this new sensation grief or groin pull? Who's in the waiting room? Is it too late to join the symposium? To buy organic greens? To save up? Save anything? With unsettling humor, Adrienne Raphel traces the suspect filigrees of the late late stage: advanced degrees, wellness trends, inherited trinketry, GIFs of inspo lynx. Sliding with formal dynamism from sonnet crown to sestina, Wiki page to personal statement, crossword to quiz, OUR DARK ACADEMIA captures the exuberant florid panicked acrobatics of this time at the edge of time.

Nervy, deft, and shot through with gloriously manic wit, OUR DARK ACADEMIA sounds out the limits of our moral commitments in this age of intersecting global crises and ongoing precarity. In their voracious appetites, these poems trawl through Pelotons and permanent positions, Tarot decks and tattoo teeth, all while making 'lemons out of lemonade.' 'I feel fine, I worry a lot / But at a distance'--would it be that worrying were always so rhythmically lush and piquant, so deeply capable of eliciting delight. OUR DARK ACADEMIA meets life's ungovernability with wild sonic ringing and the light of this singular mind's tragicomic connections and insights. Adrienne Raphel is a category all her own.--Jenny Xie

STRONG PANDEMIC ENERGY, I was saying while reading Adrienne Raphel's exquisite, frenetic poems of interchangeability and the out-of-time. Raphel's work is cerebral, melodic, and discomfiting, expertly evoking contemporary disconnection: the mad chatter of machines and the infinite loop of the one-person call-and-response. These poems feel like what it feels like to think in a time