Troubleshooting, Lonely Christopher
September, 2028
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters," Gramsci prognosticated after being imprisoned by fascists. The United States has been ingloriously slouching into a similarly frightening and destabilizing age of interregnum where the fecund promises of neoliberalism have exploded under our asses like a faulty whoopee cushion. In his latest poetry collection Troubleshooting, Lonely Christopher continues his work as iconoclastic experimentalist dredging through the slimy morass of Americana—like Diogenes, in search of an honest man, taking as his focus the rhetorical violence that pervades political communication and enables the physical violence that kills our children as they learn and devalues our labor as it earns. Now is the time where a corporation has more human rights than your average citizen, lifesaving healthcare is criminalized, and everything is mediated by faulty and predatory digital systems. This is a book for those of us who "find it hard to concentrate" while a country's sense of purpose collapses alongside its infrastructure at the behest of latter day robber barons who believe that "money is forever" and everything else is expendable. Troubleshooting brings us a fresh vision of hell replete with acidic satire and the sense that a confederacy of dunces cannot withstand the power of what it seeks to annihilate.
Lonely Christopher is a multidisciplinary queer experimental writer of poetry, fiction, and drama for stage and screen. He is the author of several books, including the poetry collections In a January Would and the 10th anniversary reissue of Death & Disaster Series. He is the founding creative director of Inter Poets Theater, managing director of the Segue Foundation, and an editor for Roof Books. His plays have been presented in Canada, China, and the United States. His film credits include several international shorts and the feature MOM, which he wrote and directed. He lives in Brooklyn and works in the field of HIV treatment and prevention for homeless youth.