Glop by Jerome Sala

Pope (A.) meets Adorno (Th.) on a dissecting table. Commodificating culture has no greater adversary than Jerome Sala. His hilarious sendups of adverts, popular and unpopular culture, socializing and politicizing media, religion, philosophy — use affection to skewer affectation. Sala’s verse has the gift of making us laugh at ourselves, grifts and griefs and all that is great in the between.

—Charles Bernstein, Author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies


Through a tiktokin’ data scatted twitterscape of browsers, ads, screens; a surveillance and scrolling culture of winks, likes, clicks that barrage our psyche, Jerome Sala’s Glop fearlessly negotiates “the vast new architecture of the moment.” Intertextually populated with the “technological sublime” of youtube’s Honey Badger, shrinkflation, game shows and reality TV, Ezra Pound, Huckleberry Hound, Hitchcock, Stalin, Hegel and Socrates, Glop invokes a robust yet terrifyingly surrealist, “eye in the sky spy balloon” of flip-floppy, pop-copied, “glop culture,” reminding us how “everything is a performance.” And through “the slick grit” of body snatching viscosity and galloping swagger, surging all feral and fugitive, with trepidation and awe, Sala’s, Glopdelivers a surfeit of satiating cocktails for the thirsty, “in the desert of the real.”

—Adeena Karasick, Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics, author of AErotomania: The Book ofLumenations

“Who cares about shit that doesn’t count?” asks Jerome Sala, and that is the case against the closed systems these funny, thorny complaints bombard. An insider of commerce and the avant-garde, a spiritually attentive searcher, an OG beleaguered punk poet, Sala has seen it all, or a lot more of it than most. I’d say he wants to save you time, but that’s not quite right – what he wants is for you to see that you see what he sees, that you know you ask yourself the questions he asks – are you being manipulated at work? Why did Socrates never write down his teachings? How many ways does anybody need to say “so there”? Sala is an ideal guide through our hell of grey goo, of glop. We need his work more than we know, more than ever.

—Jordan Davis, Author of Yeah, No



Jerome Sala’s books of poetry include cult classics such as I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, The Trip, Raw Deal, Look Slimmer Instantly, The Cheapskates, Corporations Are People, Too,! How Much? New and Selected Poems, Prom Night (a chapbook collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales) and Double Feature (a chapbook collaboration with poet Elaine Equi). His poetry and criticism have appeared in The Nation, Evergreen Review, Rolling Stone, Pleiades, Conjunctions, Boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, and many others. His work has also been anthologized in Pathetic Literature and several editions of The Best American Poetryseries. Before moving to New York city in the 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings together in Chicago, helping to create the city’s lively performance poetry scene. He has worked as a copywriter and creative director and has a PhD in American Studies from New York University.


Book Information:

· Paperback: 120 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-500-7