“Here comes Rimbaud reborn, addled, and set on fire for the 21st century.”
Forrest Gander, author of The Trace
“When I say, as I occasionally have, that Thibault Raoult is the Capablanca of our moment in poetry, I don’t mean just that he’s irritatingly debonair, but that he can see the move that rips through settled understandings. He does it with his vocabulary: with ‘extant prams’ and ‘lymph,’ with ‘Mariposa U.’ Disposable Epics wears both its Francophone influences and its heart on its sleeve; underneath, though, an acute current of clear-eyed melancholy courses: ‘I want us all to be free. / But I don’t see it happening. // Not without me getting my cut.’ Maybe none of us can believe in utopia anymore, or yet. Raoult tracks the chilly syllogisms that maintain contemporary stasis, and all the while his verve holds out a giddy, gorgeous brief for hope. This is the stuff.”
John Beer, author of Lucinda
“Thibault Raoult’s Disposable Epics is revolutionary, exhilarating, leaping with delish whimsy and disjunctive wham-bam-F-yous-to-The-Man. Here is lippy irreverent romp and rally; here is wry political impulse wed to generous bodily imp’s pulse. His enthusiasm sprung will tickle you and everyone in your party until all your ‘Mysteries are left open on their backs.’ Read at your own feral.”
Heidi Lynn Staples, author of Noise Event
“Derivative of no one, Thibault Raoult forms his own école.”
Samuel Amadon, author of Like a Sea
Disposable Epics was the runner-up manuscript in the 2013 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Tan Lin.
About the Author
Thibault Raoult is the author of three chapbooks including, most recently, Communist Couplets (Projective Industries, 2013), as well as the full-length collection Person Hour (BlazeVOX, 2011). He edits RealPoetik, performs music with Historic Sunsets, and lives with Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes in Athens, Georgia.
Acknowledgments
Cover image © M. Rasoulipour. Used by permission. Many thanks to the editors of the following journals for taking on poems from this body of work (sometimes in different versions): 6×6; Alice Blue Review; Bestoned; Better: Culture & Lit; Bomb/Bombsite; Boston Review; Caketrain; Dark Sky; Denver Quarterly; Dusie; Forklift, Ohio; Gulf Coast; I Thought I Was New Here; Mary: A Journal of New Writing; Pleiades; Realpoetik; Typo; Umbrella Factory; Volt; Wave Composition; Web Conjunctions; Western Humanities Review. Thanks especially to Projective Industries for publishing portions of this manuscript as a chapbook entitled Communist Couplets. Text © 2014 Thibault Raoult.