Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry

by Felix Bernstein

with a Preface by Trisha Low

and "What's Not to Like: A Concluding Conversation with Vanessa Place"

Paperback, 196 pages

Dimensions 5.5" x 8.5" x 0.5"

Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry by Felix Bernstein is an aggravated survey of contemporary poetry, art, and criticism; compounded by compulsive archaeological digging into the relics and ruins of Language poetry, Conceptual poetry, and Felix's own familiar familial corpus. Bernstein shows how our millennial postpostmodernism (Gaga feminism, Alt lit, New Sincerity, Queer Theory, Post-Conceptual poetry, Speculative Realism, Metamodernism, Post-Internet Art) has brought a decline in incisive and dialectical criticality, an overemphasis on social networks, slapdash viral superstars, and a hyper-mediated institutionalization of affect. Repressing their latent (modernist) structuralism and (postmodernist) irony, these millenials claim to forge an Ur-romantic turn to sheer materiality and the great outdoors-where authorial singularity and hierarchical distinction allegedly melts away into an ecologically abundant queer utopia.

It seems unfair that Felix Bernstein should both be born into the position of heir to a famous poetry surname and be something of a genius-should such a slim boy be burdened with both? It's enough to make one flap one's humid veil like a frog-duenna. Yet this book is one of sheer pace and fitful pleasures, post-conceptualism's 'death of the work' a reinvention of zero, as intrepid Felix nimbly parries with the spectre of Kenny Goldsmith, with various twentieth-century proper nouns, with family/literary history, and, always, with himself, a tail-chasing enterprise which traces another zero which is also an infinitesimal stage. Viva Felix, and I look forward to decades more of this mad business.-Joyelle McSweeney

Bernstein attempts the most explicit and energetic deconstruction of prevailing avant-garde social minutiae I've yet encountered. In fact,