Acid Western Celebration & Launch
Channel: The Operating System & Liminal Lab
Date: 2021-09-10

[Originally recorded on February 27, 2021; Event hosted on Zoom.]

The OS celebrates the newest release from our Print:Document Unlimited Editions, Robert Balun's ACID WESTERN!  This evening features performances from OS community members Orchid Tierney and Constantine Jones, as well as special guests Michelle Whittaker and Matthew Gahler.

Brenda Iijima writes that ACID WESTERN "sounds out a persistent refrain that loosens consciousness and subtly grinds down the edifices of cultural amnesia," and Danniel Schoonbeek calls it a "crusher of a debut," doing "top-notch demolition work" with "caring, weightless lyric poems."

About the book:

ACID WESTERN is a mutagenic contemporary anti-western. The poems in this collection can be seen as dispatches from the architectures of the terrain of the hyperobjects one finds themselves inside of in the 21st century, in which the social and political structures moved through on a daily basis are occurring (scaling, nesting + accumulation, incompletion, ephemerality, and oscillation are recurring features of the collection).

Time and space are also important features of these poems, both thematically, as well as formally in their composition. The notes that became the poems were written over a period of time, and arranged into the sequences here. The idea is to capture a sense of the time, space, distance, multiplicity, and complexity of the daily mundane; intersecting, looping, reiterating through this and these spaces within large and varied timescapes, in an effort to describe a sense of scale and an unfolding of interconnected events and entities, within the contemporary reverberations of violent foundational mythologies, culminating with a direct entreaty in an effort to dissolve the atomization of the enmeshed collective.

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Pick up a copy of ACID WESTERN at the OS & Liminal Lab's Bookshop today: https://bookshop.org/books/acid-western/9781946031792?aid=4259&listref=os-class-of-2021-b499115b-58f5-48b7-a219-1a2d9a5bf5fc