{"title":"Jon Paul Fiorentino","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"hello-serotonin-book-jon-paul-fiorentino-9781552451366","title":"Hello Serotonin","description":"Contemporary Canadian poetry got you down? Well, we'd like to prescribe a little Hello Serotonin, the latest in mood-enhancing poetry anti-depressants.  This new book of poems from Jon Paul Fiorentino operates within the constraints of what he terms 'synaptic syntax' - poetry that performs the very nature of neuronal activity from the point of view of a mood-enhanced Human Comedy, which,  with a quick turn of phrase, or missing neurotransmitter, could become Human Tragedy. Filled with a witty, self-deprecating and often Andy Kaufmanesque sense of humour, Hello Serotonin is today's generation of pharmaceutical poetry, and will alter your perception of therapeutic poetics. Get your prescription filled today!","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49734322651409,"sku":"NGR9781552451366","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52683542921489,"sku":"NLS9781552451366","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1552451364.jpg?v=1750829805"},{"product_id":"theory-of-the-loser-class-book-jon-paul-fiorentino-9781552451687","title":"The Theory of the Loser Class","description":"In the early nineties, Beck sang 'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?' and changed everything. Suddenly, it wasn't so bad to be a nerd or an oddball; loser chic had begun.  Ten years later, after all the computer nerds have had the last laugh, Jon Paul Fiorentino turns to Thorstein Veblen's seminal social science text from 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen's book introduced to our culture the terms 'conspicuous consumption' and 'nouveau riche'; it identified a new demographic, the leisure class, and demarcated its position in culture. The Theory of the Loser Class, then, is an art manifesto for the aesthetics and ethics of loser culture.  If the Anthony Michael Hall character in The Breakfast Club wrote poems (and, deep down, you know that he did), they'd probably read a lot like The Theory of the Loser Class. Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen's groundbreaking The Theory of the Leisure Class to Star Wars (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this carefully crafted suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of everyone's inner geek. Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburban Winnipeg, where a landscape of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video-game consoles serves as a mirror to the inner states of urban ennui among the socially inept and the culturally vexed.  By turns compassionate, funny and filled with selfloathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is never without the possibility of redemption; 'And if a loser falls,' says the narrator of 'Right in the Spine,' 'I feel it.' The Theory of the Loser Class is the perfect soundtrack for the alienated and the hopeless.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52666912145681,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52666912899345,"sku":"NLS9781552451687","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781552451687.jpg?v=1762281236"},{"product_id":"needs-improvement-book-jon-paul-fiorentino-9781552452806","title":"Needs Improvement","description":"\"Needs Improvement is a book of a new logic making its way from witty statements to slow-moving lyric villanelles, achieving brilliantly a contemporary sense of streaming among words, places and 'no self.'\"--Nicole Brossard  Whether misreading sixth grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Jacques Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino's sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information--but it does so with a wink in the detention room, a dodgeball to the gut during recess.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52684023070993,"sku":"NLS9781552452806","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751431631121,"sku":"NIN9781552452806","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781552452806.jpg?v=1762322050"},{"product_id":"post-prairie-book-jon-paul-fiorentino-9780889225237","title":"Post-Prairie","description":"Prairie poetry, as it came to be known in the 20th century, has found no more eloquent and accomplished a practitioner than Robert Kroetsch. Yet the North American prairie his work has made so recognizably visible in all of its characteristic particularities is changing profoundly in the 21st century. This change is marked by the transition of a cultural identity primarily rooted in place, to one that is rooted in a rapidly fragmenting, urbanizing, technology-based globalization. In an opening dialogue between the archetypal practitioner of this poetics of place, Robert Kroetsch, and a new practitioner of a poetics of the search for the often sublimated sign, Jon Paul Fiorentino, the reader bears witness to a rare literary event--a master passing on his legacy to the students who have become his peers--the transition from the unifying classic articulation of place to the diaspora of the vernaculars it has engendered.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689916395793,"sku":"NLS9780889225237","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889225237.jpg?v=1762336525"},{"product_id":"indexical-elegies-book-jon-paul-fiorentino-9781552452349","title":"Indexical Elegies","description":"With links to intense poetic works like John Berryman's Dream Songs, Gilbert Sorrentino's Corrosive Sublimate and Erin Moure's Furious, Jon Paul Fiorentino's new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads and associations that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience: 'All roads, side roads\/all text, signage\/All seasons, autumn\/ all memories, winter.'  The poems here build on Derrida's ideas about the psychological implications of memory and the archival impulse and on philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics of 'the index.' Indexical Elegies is a rich, emotionally charged work that showcases Fiorentino's talents at their feisty, engaged best. From its Post-Prairie pamphleteering and its comic Montreal musings to its moving elegies, this is provocative poetry that never loses touch with the reader's pleasure.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52820316225809,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820318126353,"sku":"NLS9781552452349","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781552452349.jpg?v=1764329721"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-jon-paul-fiorentino.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}