NOISE IN THE FACE OF
new poems by David Buuck
Roof Books, NY, 2016.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781931824675/noise-in-the-face-of.aspx
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 aes- thetics/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 writes a history of the problem of being a poet inside the historical moment of a city which itself had become a poem. 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
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