Dark Brandon

Poetry. DARK BRANDON is Brandon Downing's follow-up to his previous collection, THE SHIRT WEAPON. Continuing the earlier book's explorations of narrativity and false autobiography, DARK BRANDON makes use of 'castoff' modalities of American visual culture: the failed commercial, the forgotten b-picture, the county fair program, the lost advertising icon, the epic blockbuster. "There's a deceptive density in DARK BRANDON: deceptive because the tone is often exuberant and that exuberance acts as a kind of stoner Virgil leading you through the craziness of the work. But you also register that he's enjoying himself, and that joy in piecing it together is an absolute necessity if one is going to take the deal of making art up at all in this age when manipulation of image and language is accepted to the point of ho-hum. Strange, beautiful."--Anselm Berrigan.