FAQ:

Ben Doller

Thank you for your question. In this book of answers, Ben Doller (né Doyle, author of Walt Whitman Award–winning book Radio, Radio) molds a speaker confident in his own impertinence to the form of an FAQ culture, participating in an all-pervasive, invasive questioning—ultimately raising questions about voice, knowledge, and our speakers/our selves. Bending but not breaking to the form, this book of poems takes a turn for the novella, busting open the prose poem and walking the dotted yellow line in the headlights of an increasingly invisible interviewer.

“Is what seems absurd really absurd? We can never be sure what poetry is for. This poet strikingly connects a world of surveillance with one of poetics. . . . Is this expert knowledge, or psychotic ‘private’ truth? . . . In an upstate wilderness of noir, the only certainty is that everything recurs, that recurrence itself recurs. What makes this young poet’s work so compellingly in the spirit of Crane and Spicer (even Poe) is its tone of pixilated delinquency.” —Susan Howe, praise for Radio, Radio

“We ask all the wrong questions, of course. In the sharp, sad, funny poems of FAQ:, Ben Doller gives us more answers than we bargained for. He gives me some answers I wish I’d thought of myself: How do you feel? ‘I feel nice, I just now stepped upon a conveyor walkway. Sugar and spice.’”—Rae Armantrout