Microaggressions

microaggressions is the new poetry collection from American writer and commercial creative Erik Stinson, and is his first book to be published in the UK.

The collection is divided into six titled sections, composed of series of short, ‘micro’ poems that offer observations on subjects ranging from politics to shopping, fashion to ancient history, computer games and celebrity culture to more personal experiences of work and play, love and desire.

Stinson’s work as a commercial creative is evident in the poem’s frequent references to consumer culture and the psychology of a capitalist economy. He condenses our collective, globalized urban experience into a series of precise, vividly imagined moments, snapshots appropriate to the onslaught of the information age. They are poems that are both reflective and indicative of the form of modern communication.

Stinson’s poetry combines minimalist, incidental observations of life in New York City – reminiscent of Frank O’Hara – with the concise, rhythmic imagism of William Carlos Williams, transplanted into 21st-century, digital reality. Punctuation is entirely absent, and capital letters only appear in brand names – text that might be transposed to a billboard or social media post.

The poems in microaggressions are consistently surprising and disquieting. They are set in a time ‘after history’, an era of ‘refined destruction’ and ‘emotional economic decline’, in which society has become a ‘death project’, working ‘against history and the self’.

The cover artwork, by American artist Zane Lewis, visualizes the pixelated experience captured in the poems – microaggressions that compose a colourful and hallucinatory reality. The closer we look, the more obscured and abstract our vision becomes.

microaggressions is Test Centre’s first publication by an American writer, indicative of the exciting exchange of ideas and styles emerging from the transatlantic poetry scene.