CHEERLEADER'S GUIDE TO THE WORLD: COUNCIL BOOK
by Stacy Doris
Taking the point of view of a cheerleader, Doris has done a loose translation of the important Inca text Popul Vuh. The result is an amazing series of poems that work stunningly as lyric poems and also extend the readers' horizons in many directions. With drawings of football plays, Cheerleader’s Guide is one of Roof Books most cogent recent publications.
"Imagine Reese Witherspoon with the rebels in Chiapas, recounting the history of civilization & its collapse as transmitted by flying Tibetan monks. Alternately, imagine the love child of William Burroughs & John Berryman, but with pom-poms & a little literalism on the shotgun formation. Give me an A! This is a great book."
- Ron Silliman
"A force of nature, Cheerleader’s Guide to the World: Council Book reads like a Mesoamerican Grand Guignol set in the town of “Twisted” during Homecoming week at “Deception High”. In tightly excavated text, Doris mines Tibetan, Mayan, and all-American sources to offer a continuous stream of enlightenment vis à vis the shadowy transmission of cultural wisdom and trauma, “mush” and “hope.” Stacy Doris is a true treasure-master and Cheerleader’s Guide to the World is a bespoke tome for the bipolar needs of our time."
- Kim Rosenfield
"In the way that Little Nemo never quite reaches his dreamland desires, the team players in Stacy Doris’s “cultrual” guide will never finish their game. They (and we) are suspended in the animated crackle of a postnuclear mythology. Classic texts—Mayan, Tibetan, New Jerseyan—are re-released as videogame. What is the job of an ancient lineage when future ancestries are bound to be bioengineered? Read this book for the stats and scores."
- Jena Osman
Stacy Doris’ books written in English include Knot, Conference, Paramour and Kildare. Written in French are Parlement and, semi-anonymously, La vie de Chester Steven Wiener écrite par sa femme, and Une année à New York avec Chester. She has co-edited three collections of French poetry translated by American poets, among them, with Chet Wiener, Christophe Tarkos: Ma Langue est Poétique—Selected Work. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.