Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. THINGS JUST AREN'T THEY, James Payne's first full-length poetry collection, is an incendiary and comic lament for the deformation of self under capitalism. Primarily situated in the Midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, Payne's poems disentangle the processes of power permeating cultural spaces office, gallery, university, and punk scene in a voice moving between polemicist and romantic; satirist and true believer. Through exhaustive alluding and detailing, Payne re-historicizes, re- politicizes, and re-constructs our present moment, pulling it from the wake of an era characterized as post- historical and apolitical. In THINGS JUST AREN'T THEY it is 2015, 1968, 1789, 1492, and You Are Here Now, bearing a palimpsest of years, riven inexplicably into consciousness, body, sex, race, class, city, society, country, history, identity, and asking, overtly or not Why are we here? Payne's poems orbit that impossible question, shooting off like light in every direction in an attempt to elucidate, change the route, and reframe the narrative until it's within reach to erase.
"'I didn't even have to move to New York, ' writes James Payne. 'I found out I could have my dreams crushed / right here.' In this wild, cutting, and very smart collection, a man is placed on the wall like a painting because '[t]here's a hole to hide, ' while the writing is hellbent on leaving nothing unexposed. THINGS JUST AREN'T THEY whether in rangy, operatic complaints or terse little bean poles of poems skewers capitalism, consumerism, narcissism, elitism, the art world, the debt state, snobs on the East Coast, snobs in Ohio, and many, many other worthy targets. It's also and I don't say this lightly really, truly, uncommonly fucking funny. Read it right now." Natalie Shapero
"James Payne's THINGS JUST AREN'T THEY uses the overly familiar and easily forgotten to confront a repetition we call mediocrity: a cheap haze plumed by bath salts, DIY ethics, net artists, Baja Blast, and the Subway on every corner. This scene might be set in the Midwest (specifically Columbus, Ohio, where we are both from) or in any site of the USSA marked as a 'non-place' by the autocrats of cultural production. Although a technological and debt- driven alienation prevails often substance-induced and enhanced by a cool wit this is not the stylized affectlessness of Lin or Seidel. Here Payne holds up a mirror only to reveal a mirage on the horizon of 'The Desert of the Really Cool' where class is a conduit and metaphor for what it would mean to actually change a place more than the ways it has shaped you or to allow the slow pleasure of life to crystallize before its inevitable disappearance into commodity: 'If a terrain is on trend, / capitalism's still working / If capitalism can still work, / then so can anything.' THINGS JUST AREN'T THEY compels the reader with its honest criticality while acknowledging how even the most necessary measures are still likely to be the most unbearable. How to fulfill the call to 'OCCUPY EVERYTHING' when you 'don't even feel like being in [your] own body' how to tear it all down to find 'After the revolution: life.'" Cassandra Troyan"
