Poetry Against All: A Diary

Memoir | Poetry
5.25″x8″, 140 pp., paperback
Tarpaulin Sky Press
2020

This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. “Poetry is obscene,” Göransson writes. “But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.” This necessary book strips away the various illusions that have obscured poetry’s truest values. Göransson concludes: “This is written without hope.” But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that. (Jeff Jackson) Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson’s Poetry Against All — for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers — concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself. (Ken Chen)

REVIEWS OF POETRY AGAINST ALL

John Yau, Hyperallergic review of Poetry Against All

"...the most recent genre-bending book from a writer who detonates the lanes that in which mainstream writing is content to stay, from the predictable frisson caused by coolly deadpan conceptual poetry to the packaged emotional uplift of what Ron Silliman called the 'School of Quietude.'.. This book of 45 short prose entries may not be poetry in either the conventional or avant-garde sense, but it is poetry nevertheless."

Poetry Against All reviewed by Ryan Bollenbach at Big Other

"I was drawn by the breadth of Goransson’s discussions of film, music, and writing, and the aesthetics of pornography, debasement, kitsch, moralism, and nostalgia. He emphasizes an organic and visceral reading and writing practice in line with Steven Shaviro’s film criticism in The Cinematic Body—a text Göransson mentions multiple times in Poetry Against All—of embracing a masochistic relationship to art by allowing oneself to be ravished by it."

Poetry Against All: A Diary