Portable Altamont

Brian Joseph Davis offers a cocktail of overeducated detritus and tabloid trash. He gleefully mixes academic satire with vapid hollywood ambition: Jessica Simpson's Grant Application, J-Lo madlibs, Reese Witherspoon as a Marxist, Bjork as a corporate drone. Like the molotov-throwing girl-punk image on the cover, the book is incendiary. Upon reading a few poems, I laughed until I cried in the middle of a small, independent bookstore. Other customers around watched me nervously, but I couldn't stop because I was having so much fun, and it was easy to deduce that the author had fun writing "Portable Altamont." After publicly embarrassing myself, as I was leaving the bookstore, I saw people give the other copies of the book a once over. If you have heard of Post-structuralism, have seen 80s TV shows like the Facts of Life, have ever had to write a grant application, love hollywood movies, or know some celebrity gossip in spite of yourself, read this and weep with laughter. The poems are overeducated, culturally impoverished, and terribly witty.

"An elegant, wise-ass rush of truth, hiding riotous social commentary in slanderous jokes. In Davis' lyrical aphorisms, celebrity is a dazzling mirror of our most regal fears and dreams, as well as a dinky death rattle...It almost feels like he's leading a palace coup. A-" Spin Magazine, Dec 2005 "Very funny." Ian Svenonius, of Weird War, The Make-Up "By turns aggressive and hilarious, it's a twisted assault on mass culture where nothing is sacred and nothing is safe. Blowing things up has never been so much fun." National Post "Portable Altamont by Brian Joseph Davis is an astounding book of comic genius for slackers and Gen X-ers the world over. Davis has created strange, outlandish riffs on popular culture, paying homage to our literary and musical icons, by lying through his teeth: Margaret Atwood is a gangsta-rapper and Mick Jagger is the size of a pea. Portable Altamont is a brilliant combination of tabloid journalism and existential philosophy that highlights the inherent weirdness of celebrity." Geist "Innovative in form, striking in content, Brian Joseph Davis's Portable Altamont loads a literary blender with pop-culture icons, both high and low, tosses in a jigger of surrealism and a pint of sardonic wit, sets the controls for hyper-mashup, and then decants a delirious, delicious smoothie with brain-expanding powers." Paul Di Filippo, author of Ribofunk and The Steampunk Trilogy "Brian Joseph Davis's remarkable pop art is more aggressive than Warhol's electric chair, less grim, more charged. Like a call from the Governor, asking for clemency, as the first volts strike his horrible, curious, and ultimately redeemable subjects." Lynn Crosbie, author of Dorothy L'Amour "`This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.'" This disingenuous disclaimer is commonly found to accompany writing that often seem suspiciously non-fictitious. It means: "everyone knows that authors steal from the rest of the world with every breath they take, but in this case the publisher's lawyers have recommended printing this convenient lie about coincidence." Thankfully, Brian Joseph Davis writes on the copyright page of Portable Altamont a new take on the meaning of "coincidental" in "fiction". His disavowal should be adopted as standard boilerplate in all works claiming to exist in their own unique universe." John Oswald, Plunderphonics