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list price: $21.00
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Apr 2011
ISBN:9781554200542
publisher: New Star Books

Buffet World

by Donato Mancini

tagged: canadian
Description

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 the Author

Donato Mancini

DONATO MANCINI's interdisciplinary practice focuses mainly on bookworks, poetry, and text-based visual art. He is the author of four books of procedural and visual writings: LigaturesÆthelBuffet World, and Fact ‘N’ Value. His collaborative visual works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Cuba. Notable exhibitions featuring Mancini's individual works include Surveillance Sketch (Artspeak, Vancouver 2003), Untitled: Conversation Loops (Western Front, Vancouver 2004), Angels in the Angles (Gallery Atsui, Vancouver 2009), and I Smell Something Burning (H.K.Y.D.) (CSA Space, Vancouver 2011). He also co-directed the world's first genuine in-world avatar documentary, AVATARA (Centre A, Vancouver 2003), now part of the UbuWeb international archive of experimental film and video. Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal organizer of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. Mancini lives in Vancouver.

Contributor Notes

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art, and cultural criticism. His two New Star books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were each nominated for the ReLit Award, while Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Book design awards. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

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