The better part of Rob Fitterman’s more recent work—and here I am particularly thinking of SPRAWL, PILLBOX and NOW WE ARE FRIENDS—concentrates on public performances of privacy. Fitterman has always mistrusted the ideology of lyric sincerity and he has a healthy disdain for all forms of prefabricated affect. But his well-earned cynicism is tempered by a countervailing sense that unoriginal language can indeed express heartfelt, if barely articulate and articulated experience. So underneath his source texts’ self-dramatizations and clichéd self-pity you can hear echoes, however faint, of real pain. While it is, therefore, hard not to read his work as an attack on commodified subjectivity as well as on a debased poetry of emotional authenticity, it is also hard not to detect in his poetry a consistent protest against suffering.

Fitterman’s works constitute an anti-nostalgic and timely re-iteration of appropriation strategies and engagement in modes of radical mimesis that critically examine capitalism under digital culture, mounting an agenda of changing the distribution of the sensible not by making the invisible visible but by proposing counter-reading to ambient distraction and ever-more insidious textual instrumentalities in a culture saturated with marketing and deluged by information…

Fitterman isn’t just bringing the avatar voice offline, he’s nominating it as a poetic voice and what it says as poetry, whether anyone likes it or not.

No, Wait… is able to craft complex moments out of the original blog or post text that turn outward expressions into much keener inner struggles.