Apocalyptic grandstanding, even after the turn into the new millennium and especially in light of the "war on terror," will not go out of fashion soon, but it may never find a more passionate, lyrical and moodily entertaining outlet than Brownstein's 11-chapter litany of pre-mortem griefs, postmodern anxieties and poetic calls to higher consciousness. Recalling some of the urbanized Old Testament rhetoric of the beat writers at their peak—Ginsberg in Kaddish, Corso in his The Happy Birthday of Death
days—but lacking their Dada whimsy or decadent posturing, World on Fire
struggles to reconnect a floundering humanity with Gaea, or "earth spirit," and to sever our inexplicable pact with death, as manifest in the wholesale pilfering of natural resources, the toxification of everything from the atmosphere to the sperm cell and the crushing of diversity via global monoculture. Wavering between documentary (quotes from Chomsky, Shiva and other renegade thinkers abound), an erotic love letter to an unnamed other who could be the Gaea itself, violent stand-up tragedy in which readers are confronted directly with their own indifference ("Your life's fish tank a Möbius strip vista of degraded landscapes projected on ever-larger TV screens") and an inexhaustible, volcanic vent ("Rage—how can I control it?"), is nevertheless hard to put down, stopping no place for very long and yet honed in on one potentially grating, but cathartic theme: how to defeat social and political indifference when fear and self-loathing are the engines of the economy itself. Brownstein's Socratic moments never wend far into the speculative adversary's court, and a note of obsessiveness suggests that the associative fluidity is more the byproduct of insomnia than the fruits of Brownstein's labors since the '70s as the author of several collections of fiction (Self-Reliance; The Touch) and poetry. Nonetheless, this is one of the most eloquent recent poetic works to cover the downsides of "progress" and to cry out for a counterpunch against the manipulations of empire. (Apr.)
