Disaster Suites
That disaster could be arranged in the musical sense for a human voice would be a thing too dreadful to celebrate were it not a realization of what it means to be an instrument of history. In Rob Halpern s Disaster Suites, the lyric I is a disturbed, disturbing presence in a world we recognize as inadequate but ours, its song a reminder of our dreadful yet beautiful potential.  Benjamin Friedlander --Benjamin FriedlanderA paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful Disaster Suites into motion. They produce a music missing in the count now counts as one reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it audible: war, so-called natural catastrophe, a public sphere where there is no / Public. As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster s lyric I summons its own kind of counting (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard the drowned and the bombed in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays down: the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, (CENSORED BY AMAZON.COM) and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again. --Sianne Ngai