The Happy End / All Welcome

by Monica de la Torre

Overview

Poetry. THE HAPPY END / ALL WELCOME is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants... At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937027735
Publisher:	Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Mónica de la Torre is the author of four previous poetry collections—two in Spanish and two in English, and several chapbooks, including The Happy End (The Song Cave). A native of Mexico City, she has translated Latin American poets and co–edited several multilingual anthologies, most notably Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon). Her work has been published in magazines such as Aufgabe, Convolution, frieze, and The New Yorker, as well as anthologies and exhibit catalogs including Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship, Corrected Slogans (Triple Canopy), and The Animated Reader (The New Museum). She was the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency in 2014. She teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Columbia University and is BOMB Magazine's senior editor.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/27/2017
In this delightful collection, poet and translator de la Torre (Public Domain) literarily extends artist Martin Kippenberger’s installation “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika,” which she describes as “an assortment of numbered tables and office desks with pairs of mismatched chairs within a soccer field flanked by grandstands.” These formally inventive poems feature job notices, briefs, interview transcripts, and an office furniture inventory; readers will feel like they have stumbled into a job fair in some alternate universe. For example, a manager explains to a consultant that “We don’t really have a CEO. We have an Artistic Director. The office chairs surrounding us are ghosts of obsolete hierarchies. We keep them as reminders of what can go wrong.” De la Torre presents everything with a straight face, even a hilariously jargon-riddled posting for someone to give a presentation on the value of humor in the workplace. She warps and exaggerates the more ridiculous elements of professional etiquette, start-up culture, and corporate language in ways that encourage readers to look deeper into our work spaces to see how strange they really are. Perhaps, as de la Torre suggests in “Ad Copy,” “The mantra of The Happy End / All Welcome might be that slapstick speaks louder than words, the work imploding with what it implies.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly