YOUR BOOK: Exit Theater
PUBLISHED IN: November 2016
THE AUTHOR: Mike Lala
THE EDITOR: Stephanie G’Schwind
THE PUBLISHER: The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University
SUMMARY: Selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Exit Theater casts classical elegy, with dazzling formal innovation, into a staggering work of contemporary, political polyphony. Through monologues, performance scripts, and poems of exquisite prosody, Mike Lala examines the human figure—as subject and object, enemy and ally—in the context of a progressively defigured and hostile world. Catullus, Shakespeare, Cy Twombly, and Lydia Delectorskaya echo across engagements with Israeli generals, accused terrorists, State Department employees, nuclear scientists, Saturday Night Live actors, war criminals, malware, and a host of mythic, literary, and half-extant spectral characters. Amid the cacophony, Lala implicates every actor, including himself, in a web of shared culpability vis-à-vis consumerism, representation, speaking, writing, and making art against the backdrop of the endless, open wars of a post–Cold War, post-2001 era. Exit Theater is a debut of and against its time—a book about war, art, and what it means to make art in a time of war.
THE BACK STORY: Exit Theater is the work of four years of research and writing about art, empires, ecology, the future, poetics, and technology, and a childhood growing up on military bases around the world.
WHY THIS TITLE: Exit Theater is in many ways about departures. The book itself is a theater of exits, through which it summons a cast of dead (and living) characters who appear in poems, speak, then depart, dissolving into the whole as the sum of poems moves toward formal decay. In one sense, Exit Theater is just that: a book, a textual theater, composed of exits.
But it’s also a book about empire, the maintenance of empire and living within one, and looking out to other, previous empires through translation and ekphrasis and trying to understand their patterns and oneself as a subject within them. Culture—including literature—composes the soft power of empires, but in warfare, a “theater” is a geographical area in which acts of warfare progress. So in another sense, Exit Theater refers to a place in which death occurs, the spectacle of that death, and an imperative: Leave.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: Exit Theater engages with something ancient and perhaps ageless with a deep rigor in musicality, thought, and research, and in its clear-eyed look at the world behind the curtain.
The poems and the book as a whole invite readers to take this look, and to do it by de-centering individual experience—their own, a speaker’s, or a narrator’s—something that poetry, especially American poetry, often seems incapable of.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
A marvel of genre-straining performances…a book that challenges and resists the vague accumulations of knowledge upon which regimes depend…that neither assumes nor denies your participation, but utterly exhausts it.
-The Fanzine
Causality and aesthetic efficiency, staged expectations and reality effects, the chargé that is also a discharge, all are affects in the time of violence, time not as epoch but as duration, as the continuity of lived experience. It is this phenomenological, durational time of violence that measures Mike Lala’s Exit Theater. Simultaneously elegy and poetic sequence, theater and documentary, ekphrastic and translational, the book’s continually self-disrupting and adapting formal range unsettles Chekhov’s economy. Lala’s book manifests these cumulative senses of our time, the dull, buzzing inescapable ache that arises when the weapons have come off the stage and constitute the real, everywhere and nowhere.
-Jacket2
Lala merges verse, academic text, and lyric essay with writing for the stage in an elegiac debut collection meant to be beheld and enacted. This provocative book is designed as an immersive experience…poetry only in that it announces itself as such: this is performance, myth creation, and rally cry. In his understated confrontations with forms of societal violence – militarism, climate change, economic collapse – Lala attends to the musicality of language, seductively contrasting the lush with the sparse. Throughout, visual disjunctions and negative space wield tremendous power. This is a dense and challenging yet rewarding read.
-Publishers Weekly
“In Exit Theater Mike Lala turns away, turns from, turns to his iPhone, to Cy Twombly, to Catallus, but there is no exit from the maze of the world that is in ‘our time,’ as Hemingway knew, a gun cabinet. And every gun is a life, standing at attention and loaded, as Dickinson knew. In these lyrical meditations crisscrossing the fields of personal, national, and international histories, strewn with bodies, Lala confronts, without flinching, the terrible beauties born of fin de siècle pessimism and optimism: we remain in the closet.”
—Tyrone Williams, final judge
“Michael Lala’s Exit Theater deals mystery and suspense. This poet is expert at revealing the personal alongside the public through a language that’s intimate, searching, and uniquely his. The reader becomes an apt detective, ready to sift through imagistic and verbal evidence where the everyday and fantastic coexist. Exit Theater is indeed a challenging and seductive journey into an inner sanctum of reveries.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
AUTHOR PROFILE: Mike Lala is the author of Exit Theater, which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 2016; the chapbooks Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama (Present Tense Pamphlets, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art 2016) and In the Gun Cabinet (The Atlas Review Chapbook Prize 2016); the multi-channel Homeric sound installation Infinite Odyssey (Pioneer Works 2017); and the opera Oedipus in the District (Juilliard/National Sawdust, 2018; The Tank NYC 2019). Poems appear in BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, the PEN Poetry Series, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula. He’s presented work across the US and Canada, at the 92nd Street Y (for Anne Carson’s Tenth Muse), The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Knitting Factory, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City. Lala grew up in the western United States and Tokyo, and lives in New York. http://www.mikelala.com
SAMPLE CHAPTER:
https://bostonreview.net/poetry/mike-lala-say-goodbye-shores-catullus-101
https://poetrysociety.org/features/in-their-own-words/mike-lala-on-lydia
https://pen.org/from-in-the-gun-cabinet/
LOCAL OUTLETS: Any local bookstore should be able to stock the book. ISBN: 9781885635532.
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Anywhere books are sold: Barnes & Nobles, Indie Bound, etc.
PRICE: $16.95
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: lalamichael@gmail.com
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 