The Unreal City

The exploratory second collection from Lala (Exit Theater) considers the destructive capitalistic structures created around the “scream called employment” and labor that separates modern people from the natural world, even as the climate crisis intensifies. In “Elizabeth Street,” Lala offers an animated tour of Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, leaping from store names to street names to people, while focused on a motif of money, who has it and who doesn’t: “Right on Bleecker: Quartino Bottega, Harmony, Bianca, Von, Madame/ Geneva, Think, Saxon + Parole, then Left on Bowery,/ Where a shaded gaze my lasso lassos lasses’ eyes from thrice above my pay grade.” It’s a New York rendition of Hope Mirrlees’s 1919 modernist poem “Paris,” which depicts the shop signs, people, and places she sees over the course of a day in the French capital. Lala draws heavily from this work, along with Virgil’s “Geogics” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “drones spread out like patients across the Arab sky,” he writes in a 2023 take on Eliot’s poem. This collection is intricate and terrifying in its depiction of the present moment, even as it offers an alternative future that doesn’t have money as its foundation. (July)