Travis Jeppesen’s debut collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV is a ruthlessly implosive meditation on the death of language in a media-saturated world. Perfectly complimented by Jeremiah Palecek’s sardonic illustrations, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV ponders the mundane and the un-nameable with a highly personal mixture of devastation and humor.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Jeppesen’s novel Victims: “Jeppesen’s novel has the potential to change your life.” --Michael Schaub, Bookslut
“An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up.” --Michael Miller, Village Voice
“An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up.” --Michael Miller, Village Voice
About the Author
Travis Jeppesen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, studied literature at the New School for Social Research in New York and the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He currently resides in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of a novel, Victims, which was selected by Dennis Cooper to debut his Little House on the Bowery Series for Akashic Books in 2003. His poetry, prose, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online periodicals, and his work has been translated into Russian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, and Bulgarian. Jeremiah Palecek attended the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, in Old Lyme Connecticut, was a visiting artist at the Glasgow School of Art, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he maintains a daily painting blog. Jeremiah’s work has been said to be a collection of media detritus which is reconstructed, and (re)presented, through the medium of painting. While his work tends toward images culled from the more pop elements of our culture, there is always a sense of intense normalcy, which imbues his work with an air of confrontation. Having left America in 2003, Jeremiah Palecek lives in Prague, Czech Republic.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A Ticket to the Dream",
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Poems I Wrote While Watching TV (Paperback)
Physically a very handsome book, and the drawings and watercolor work by Jeremiah Palecek show an eccentric wit and a pallid dash, and yet the real revelation here will be Travis Jeppesen's poetry. Jeppesen lives in Prague, and writes in English, like an angel. Those who have read his critical writing, or his debut novel VICTIMS, are in for yet another treat, but I should say first off that his poetry isn't quite what you'd expect, it's much more gestural and surrealist than his prose writing and for that reason alone sometimes a bewildering experience, like being thrown into a maelstrom without so much as a paddle's worth of context.
Was he watching TV when he wrote these poems? Maybe; they exhibit some of the rapidfire disconnect between image and line that you feel when zapping s remote from channel to channel, and yet paradoxically the suite of "TV Haiku," for sure the ones most obviously about the television experience, are the most placid and focussed, like oild school haiku with the requisite number of syllables. It's elsewhere, away from the TV, that the madness rises to high intensity, as image upon image rains down from a mackerel sky upon the reader, like crockery from a high window, so that the experience of reading something like his "Pippi Longstocking" poem is like dodging a poisonous hailstorm. Keeps you on your mark, this writing does. If JG Ballard had turned to poetry while in the middle of writing CRASH and ATROCITY EXHIBITION, he still would have been lucky to have hit the heights of PIWWWTV. I didn't cotton one hundred per cent to "The Bath," and yet it seems an experiment worth taking, perhaps a sort of cut up of bygone diction, or applying prose breaks to an ornate, bourgeois prose? And if ever I meet Jeppesen I'll ask him why he doesn't get someone else to write the titles of his poems, for he is invariably bad at them, in the sense that none of his titles come anywhere near the quality of his best poems, and that's an unusual weakness in one otherwise so talented. Outside of these picayune complaints, I bow down very low to this amazing, near-hallucinatory poetry. He makes me tremble. This past year we lost the surrealist master, Philip Lamantia, but from far off in Czechoslovakia his spirit rises again in this new boy.
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