The Future of Memory

Perelman's substantial new collection, his ninth since 1975 and a standout even in this exceptionally rich year of poetry publication, opens with the bizarre confession that "Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for/ decades." This perhaps ironic retraction of a career spent in resolute avant-gardism ("I / seem to have lost my avant-garde // card in the laundry") is only the first in a dizzying series of raids on a bank of personal and collective false memories, an investigation of socially produced irreality where every dream is faked, all the currencies are counterfeit, perception is hallucinatory and cognition programmed: "The thought-track wakes and thinks," he writes in "The Masque of Rhyme," "novelty again, the same old novelty. // It's almost worse than royalty."

Capacious, hilarious, allusive and disturbing, The Future of Memory shows that there is a future for poetry, poetry as presence of mind, active repossession of the senses, deconcealment of mystified structures; of risk, not recapitulation. At the close of "The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake," Perelman writes: "Those deprogrammed people glimmering beyond / the evening's blocky conspiracy theories, / willing their present without shooting our past / to a bloody parable / ?have you found a way to call them yet?" This book suggests that he has. — Publishers Weekly