Stefans's multigenre Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
(2003) has already emerged as a major text on its subject, and his digital poems would make most cognoscenti's top 10 lists. Published simultaneously with Stefans's essay collection Before Starting Over
(Salt Books), this set of five chapbooklike sections of poems reads like a "real playstation/ or organic whist" that treats history as a kind of textual joke; every line signals a deep, playful, Frank O'Hara–like imbrication in the 20th-century's pains and pleasures : "Pound's flopping of oars... crises that approach with the grace/ of guttural, 32-bit Nazis, or with jodi.org's antique 'pro-situ' strains." The section "The Window Ordered to be Made" contains "They're Putting a New Door In" (which made The Best American Poetry 2004
) and "Poem Formerly Known as 'Terrorism' " ("I'm hurt like Rocky," notes its speaker). There's a set of 15-line poems documenting the travels and travails of a figure named Pasha Noise, who also appears in a concluding comic strip (with illustrations by Gary Sullivan). These new poems broaden the range of Stefans's wonderfully supersaturated sensibility. (Nov.)
