Books

Noise in the Face of

Roof Books, 2016

David Buuck’s newest collection, Noise in the Face of, is aesthetically strong, political poetry at its finest. Written in Oakland during the early days of the Occupy Oakland movement, through the Bay Area protests in the wake of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and many, many others, Noise marries fire and form, going beyond representational aesthetics to craft writing that aims to be the thing itself.

“David Buuck writes a history of the problem of being a poet inside the historical moment of a city which itself had become a poem ‘sick of poetry, not finding another form for this roving disgust.’ Oakland was once a messed-up erupting ambiguity of the negatively capable indecorously accessorizing, the messed-up positron of the all, but maybe what Oakland was also was the precipice overlooking Silicon Valley, a cliff geo-tagged as a protest taking the form of a funeral in the form of a dance you refuse to do: ‘Whose fuck ups? / Our fuck ups.’ The meta-shards of mega-self-awareness that come after are a jewel on the radiant pavement of after that.” —Anne Boyer

“I don’t know when I’ve ever read poetry more completely of and in the streets—where the form and content of the poetics of the march and occupation and riot are so thoroughly merged. Squelch that cop radio feedback, turn up the Michael Jackson—the livestream is on and in your hands, comrade. David Buuck has his razor sharp eye and ear at all times on ‘what/’s beyond the shattered frame’ of mere representational aesthetics/politics: this is poetry bashed out on a burning piano as it hurtles downhill during an Oakland riot. I for one am more than a little excited to be along for the ride.” —Stephen Collis

“David Buuck’s Noise in the Face of is not a book exposing lies. It is about the labor of standing together in the face of the exposed and learning to be there for one another. There is Love here and there is a promise for enough of it, just stand in there and you know he is right. What an honor to be alive at the same time as this poet who is showing that there is so much more beyond the filth and conspiracy of politics.” —CAConrad

Read a review on Lana Turner (PDF)

Read excerpts on:
Brooklyn Rail
Capilano Review
Armed Cell (PDF)

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Site Cite City

Published by Futurepoem Books, 2015

Entropy’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2015
SPD Handpicked Selection – September 2015
SPD Non-Fiction Bestseller List July-September 2015

“In David Buuck’s Site Cite City, the detective novel meets the essay meeting the poem in prose, which, somewhere along the way, has already bisected machine language and passed through the byways of psychogeography, making for a text as mysterious and entertaining as it is activist and knowledgeable. An invaluable contribution to everything.”  —Renee Gladman

“David Buuck works at the axis of performative and civic aims to make a narrative that is clarified the more it breaks down, as much through desire as by violent or revolutionary means.” —Bhanu Kapil

Read a review on Jacket

Read an excerpt on The Volta

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An Army of Lovers

co-written with Juliana Spahr

Published by City Lights, 2013

In the age of Occupy, An Army of Lovers re-asks the question, what is the relationship between poetry and politics?

“An Army of Lovers explores the liminal spaces where cities and individuals come together and stand apart with strange, brainy grace.” —Michelle Tea

“A rigorous book, and a book of marvels, with something funny, something painful, stirring on every page.” —Kevin Killian

“These are stories told with one foot in the Summer of Love and the other in the sewer.” —Adam Park, Eleven Eleven Journal

Read an excerpt on BOMB Magazine

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The Shunt

Published by Palm Press, 2009

“The Shunt provocatively explores one of our most ordinary experiences of social discomfort—embarrassment for the flailing comedian and his all too visible affective labor—in a strikingly intelligent and utterly heartbreaking way. For all its acerbic tonality, The Shunt’s affective agenda is thus the exact opposite of ironic cynicism, which is one of this brilliantly discomforting book’s most delightful surprises.” —Sianne Ngai

“With its stutters, fractures, puns, sarcasms, and ironies, The Shunt is part of a cluster of books recently written by US poets attempting to understand what it means to live in a country that is constantly bombing other countries. But with its relentless attention to the group psychosis that this state of siege induces in US citizens, The Shunt is also something sui generis. This is your brain on war.” —Juliana Spahr

“Stuttering, hemming, hawing, failing, flailing, and flopping, the comedian tries to coerce the narrative ideology of wartime into a punch line, but the punch is always awready pre-packed by Big Brother’s Big Other. As Beckett almost observed, nothing is funnier (or sadder, depending on your tolerance for correct allegorical apprehension of permanent crisis) than someone trying repeatedly to slip on a flipping banana peel and getting shut down every time. The Shunt puts the ‘tic Alpo’ back in ‘political poetry.’” —K. Silem Mohammad 

Read a review on Jacket

Scanned copy on Archive.org

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Chapbooks

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