The Happy End / All Welcome
April 2017
The Happy End / All Welcome
$17.00
"I cannot imagine poetry without her."
— Bob Holman
About the Book
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.
Praise
In wit, in range, de la Torre’s gifts are all-too apparent, but her real brilliance is in bringing together seemingly mutually exclusive elements: the poem/the story, the emotive/the theoretical, the amusing/the tragic.
— Dan Fall, The Brooklyn Rail
I cannot imagine poetry without her.
— Bob Holman
Mónica de la Torre is an exceptional writer who somehow manages to plumb and retrieve items from the inexorable spaces created by time and translation.
— Richard Maxwell
It is to this end that de la Torre subverts recognizable form, reorienting the performance of author, voice, and utterance in a way that constitutes an extraordinary striking of our usual lyric sets.
— Nathaniel Rosenthalis
Really, de la Torre’s book is a love letter to the imagination—a paean to what remains uneven in uniform office environments, what rings out of tune when one is reading from a script. […] The reader is required to play, too—to riff, malapropize, to slapstick. De la Torre’s aim, as Wittgenstein once put it, may be "to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to patent nonsense."
— Darcie Dennigan, Colorado Review
De la Torre masterfully tackles the contradictions embedded in the workplace, where the body feels simultaneously free to choose the positions it will hold and constrained by the structure it occupies.
— Michael Valinsky
Excerpt
My English is no good.
My English is not very well.
My English is… no English.
My English is no where.
My English is not good and it is heard badly.
My English is no frequently.
My English is no native so apologies to everyone.
Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-73-5
Publication Date: April 1, 2017
