Nobody’s Protest Novel | Issue 20 | n+1

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Poetry like this isn’t for everyone—no poetry is—and the lowercase typography and bare emotional content are likely to remind many readers of high-school poetry (their own, perhaps), triggering a squeamish antagonism that distracts from how, tonally, taken as a whole, these poems manage to be assertive without being overbearing and pitiful without lapsing into vanity, neither of which seems especially high school—or even college, really—to my mind.

The will that animates Tao Lin’s early fiction could easily be described as whimsical, and yet no less easily as somber. Neither aspect was uncommon in American narrations of the early third millennium, nor was it rare for both to manifest within a single narrative, but their relative proportion varied wildly. Enormous sums of cheery froth could be swept around a miserable grain of salt; pessimism could be magnified to such a scale and accompanied by such groundless, blatant moralizing as to render the entire project faintly, yet indelibly, ludicrous. People were very confused. They wanted…

Nobody’s Protest Novel | Issue 20 | n+1

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