The new printing came back with the last three pages mussed up, so am offering copies for $8 (shipping included), along with a personalized errata slip. Contact me at dbuuck @ mindspring dot com or paypal me directly at that email.
Blurbs & Reviews:
The Shunt provocatively explores one of our most ordinary experiences of social discomfort—embarrassment for the flailing comedian and his all too visible affective labor—in a strikingly intelligent and utterly heartbreaking way. For all its acerbic tonality, The Shunt’s affective agenda is thus the exact opposite of ironic cynicism, which is one of this brilliantly discomforting book’s most delightful surprises.
— Sianne Ngai
With its stutters, fractures, puns, sarcasms, and ironies, The Shunt is part of a cluster of books recently written by US poets attempting to understand what it means to live in a country that is constantly bombing other countries. But with its relentless attention to the group psychosis that this state of siege induces in US citizens, The Shunt is also something sui generis. This is your brain on war.
— Juliana Spahr
Stuttering, hemming, hawing, failing, flailing, and flopping, the comedian tries to coerce the narrative ideology of wartime into a punch line, but the punch is always awready pre-packed by Big Brother’s Big Other. As Beckett almost observed, nothing is funnier (or sadder, depending on your tolerance for correct allegorical apprehension of permanent crisis) than someone trying repeatedly to slip on a flipping banana peel and getting shut down every time. The Shunt puts the “tic Alpo” back in “political poetry.” — K. Silem Mohammad
Buuck/BARGE 