Russell Carisse reviews Amanda Deutch’s Bodega Night Pigeon Riot (2020) in antilang

Russell Carisse was good enough to provide the first review for Amanda Deutch’s Bodega Night Pigeon Riot (2020) in antilang #8. Thanks so much! You can see his original review here. As he writes:

Arrivals<>Departures

 

Rummaging around Brooklyn’s streetscape with Amanda Deutch’s Bodega Night Pigeon Riot, from above/gound press, one is drawn along and through the accoutrements and fashions of late-capital’s urban millieux. This chap of haiku rattles off with arhythmic comparisons made by the witness in the window of a moving train with words that embark on the dichotomous unrest of jarring the traditional fair of petals, lurching suddenly against the ossified detritus of economic growth - the final excrements of replicative production. There’s a moment hanging on a bridge reaching for itself, but the lul of progress, the lul of onomatopoeic security, of the flashing signs, the monetary venture to work arrives fully stationed for a fresh departure from tradition, again, but with touch of that temporal inflexibility and constraint incorporated in conjunction with the police state - America's cultural soul, as approved religiously over and over again. A soul that is expressed by civil iconographics and neon churches posing in stolen clothes. Pulling into a solipsism that is triggered by the act of naming, a feigned escape materializes from personal reminiscence but tempered with its assurances of willful forgetting and itemized appropriations - the valorized garb of existential valuation. And then it’s off again, with the cycle of storefront-church-mural, uninterupted and augmented by humanity’s popular refrain singing its tune of wealth appreciation. The destination arrives with the traditional fair now blooming and employed with a future naturally littering itself for an immanent return, as one will keep coming back to these poems. Oh, and FUCK the POL(ICE)!