[---------]: Placeholder

The poems included in this volume are drawn from Rob Halpern's four collections and two chapbooks - Rumored Place, Disaster Suites, Music for Porn, Common Place, Weak Link and Imaginary Politics - one long writing project for which [ - - - - - ] stands here in lieu of a proper title. According to Halpern, this sign serves as "a placeholder for a common world, the world we radically long for but whose advent is blocked by current conditions, the world whose beauty we know in dreams and whose plenty we can already taste, the world whose realization will make these poems irrelevant." In the writing collected under the sign of this Placeholder, hope for that world finds expression in the most explicit desires, among whose objects are the figures of the wounded US soldier and the Guantanamo detainee. It's in these wrecked bodies that Halpern seeks the possibility of a truly unconditional love, at once prohibited and revolutionary.