FLOWERING MALL
by Brandon Brown
Brandon Brown’s Flowering Mall transforms Baudelaire to revive what Rob Fitterman calls the "punk spirit that is French Symbolism." Drifting through the Bay Area with his friends and lovers, Brown’s boulevardier discovers the hunger of undead poetry for more scornful representations of our silly human culture, resurrecting Fleur du Mal only to use it to drive a stake through the heart of his cravings. Camille Roy says, "It’s nothing like porn but it does deliver hysteria of recognition at our dear appetites, dashing towards the rotten social body." And dashing that body on the rocks beneath the Golden Gate in a continuing round of consumption and excess. The writing’s like that, too.
Brandon Brown’s exhilarating translation of Baudelaire offers up an uncanny present of chat-room cats and wage slaves, vampire doubles and personal history. This visionary work overflows with the political possibilities and dilemmas of 21st century decadence. In Flowering Mall’s hyperbolic, sensual realm, pleasure is a crucial path to liberation. But, everything we love is suspect. The book critiques its own gorgeous excess (of language, sex, food, pop culture culture, fashion, and art) as tied to a sordid capitalist loop: consumption, surveillance, ever-escalating desire. This book puts everything on the table: the ecstasy, the ugliness, the mess, and the moments of a ‘future perfect’ that blossom in the vexed present. Boredom, friendship, decadence, and disgust might not save us. But then again, they might. With its fantastic honesty, humor, brio and intelligence, Flowering Mall leaves the reader drunk on possibility.
- Lauren Levin
Brandon Brown is the author of The Persians By Aeschylus and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. He is also the author of several chapbooks, including Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Wondrous Things I Have Seen and Your Mom’s a Falconress. He is from Kansas City, Missouri and has lived in San Francisco since 1998.