Buffet World

Donato Mancini
Poetry
128 pages, 6×9 inches
Price: $21 CAD · $21 USD
ISBN: 9781554200542
Date published: 2011-04-05
Availability: in print & available

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About Buffet World

Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late–late–night–snack capitalism.

Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of consumption and the formal device of the list. The numbers and statistics that fill the book stand as a critique of the grotesquely inhumane scales of capitalist production today – in–kind retort to the brutality of economic–fundamentalist abstractions that increasingly determine policy and regulate inner lives.

Incisive humour permeates Buffet World. The poems capture Mancini's diamond wit, as well as his dissatisfaction with the conditions of a world built on so many systemic cruelties. Buffet World underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimisers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with a surreal spectacle of false hope.

The images in Buffet World are colourful and almost garish. The words are, in true Mancini fashion, brilliantly manipulated. Equally concerned with the violence done to our planet, our bodies and imaginations, these poems perform a deep critique, but remain accessible and fun to read.

About Donato Mancini

Writer / critic / visual artist Donato Mancini is the author of You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012), Buffet World (2010), Æthel (2008), and Ligatures (2005). Two of his New Star books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were each nominated for the ReLit Award, and Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Society book design awards.

A long-time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal organiser of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. Other publications include 105 posbL resons 4t ;; of thot, an artist's book from Bookhug (Toronto, 2010); Fact 'N' Value, a book edition from Fillip (Vancouver, 2011) as well as poetic and critical writings in publications such as The Capilano Review, Open Letter, West Coast Line, Rampike, W, The West Wind Review, Parser, ditch, Area Sneaks, Poetry is Dead and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

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