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Published on 5/7/08
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Dennis Cooper, best known for his transgressive-punk five-novel “George Myles cycle” (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period), began as a poet and was a fixture of New York’s downtown literary scene in the ’80s. Now an icon with significant influence—NYU feted his work and bought his papers in 2000—Cooper lives in Paris, blogging and working on theater projects.
The Weaklings marks his return to poetry, his first collection in 12 years. It opens with the sequence “Elliott Smith at 14,” a meditation on the late singer-songwriter, who died in 2003. Cooper’s attraction to the suicidal troubadour makes sense. Cooper’s work, like Smith’s, explores dark underworlds and outlaws, the flat tone and gnarled emotions of the adolescent mind and its strained relationship to adulthood. “Maybe it’s never my idea / being lit up by the drugs, / or they have shined shit,” Cooper writes. “Whatever this is, I rule.”
That comic nihilism, often voiced by hilariously unreliable gay youths, is one of Cooper’s tried-and-true tropes. It’s also one of the main pleasures of reading The Weaklings, along with its passionate attention to human relationships—mostly dysfunctional ones. Both traits set these poems apart from so many current poets’ inert language play. Cooper writes, in arch-confessional flourishes: “And the fact you’re my / friend makes me think / I love you, but if we had / sex I’d realize what I’ve / been assuming I want / is pretentious, just me / confusing porn for a / religion again.”
Released as a limited edition—with art by Jarrod Anderson that recalls Joe Brainard’s naïf-homoerotic line drawings—The Weaklings will set you back 50 bucks. But get it while you can; this book demands an audience.
