Old Business
Ryan Dobran
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Paperback, 120pp.
ISBN: 978-0-9994-3133-7
Retail Price: $18.00
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Spring 2019
Book Description
The poetry of Ryan Dobran begins in a congenial, observational mode and crystallizes swiftly into an engrossing lattice of voice and affect, a prismatic language that pivots unassumingly through shades of the quotidian and the disenchanted, the earnest and the circumspect, the ingenuous and the vatic. It is a recognizably contemporary poetry: familiar discourses and lifeworlds made uncanny by an exacting realism, conscientious of the creaturely and all-too-embodied travails of a rapidly immaterializing modernity, persistently shot through with fleeting glimpses of those distributed, elusively disciplinary forces — of law, finance, technology — that everywhere impinge locally and yet evade global apprehension. At the same time, there is yet something about Dobran’s clear-eyed view out onto the actual existing world that bestows a kind of proleptic clarity on the Skinner box of the present: the poetic defamiliarization at play is not the techno-stunned alienation of modernism but something older and more stoic, comic, or forgiving, not didactic and yet in its composure quietly instructive.
Old Business is a well-turned full-length debut comprising three chapbook-length poems that have previously seen only limited release by small presses in the UK — Story One, The Meritocrat, and The Last Shyness — along with a suite of poems published here for the first time.
Praise for Old Business
"Ryan Dobran wrote his book at work. This means that he wrote while engaging in a historically conditioned mode of behaviour that, rather than manifesting its historical nature through a process of self-overcoming, repeatedly collapses back again and again into crushed self-maintenance. This is in itself intimately paradoxical. . . . What the poems tell us before they tell us anything at all is that Ryan Dobran cares less about his job than he does about poetry. If this was all that there was to the book, I would very probably still like it. But it is not all that there is. What I find fascinating and wonderful about Story One is that, I think, Dobran writes from within the false permanence of a working day. The utter boredom and the stagnant fog of faux-eternity through which work is experienced has been placed as a kind of covering and a skin over his poems. . . .
In the first volume of Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance, one reads a conversation on the political efficacy of modernist art in which a character states: “A loosened screw, a few grains of sand in the gears, a missing or misplaced wire, those were concrete things by which to measure the results of reading, of looking at a picture.” I do not know of a time when the standard mode for recognizing the essence of an artwork has been to see it actualized in a broken machine, but that time might come. For now, we have the inverse. As I read them, Ryan Dobran’s poems stand as neglect translated, and they cannot but present themselves with a faint light of redemption. That is to say that the finished moments visible through the translucent skin of Story One might be one of the ways in which white-collar work is remembered by those who no longer need to do it."
—Tom Allen, review of Story One in Hix Eros
"It’s gnarly and difficult work. . . . there are killer lines on most every page. But, despite the narrative and the presence of a central first-person speaker who functions as something like a ‘character,’ its narrative doesn’t resolve or offer closure—it is a perpetual present characterized by incremental change which doesn’t change anything but merely repeats, an implicitly cyclical and easily-recognisable structure of routine whose exaggerations occur in the telling. . . . Banal events are stretched out into luxuriantly cynical description—the moment of waking, showering, slicing a fruit, parking a car—while environmental change, globalized warfare and the workings of international capital become larger frames which can’t be afforded the same narrative clarity, appearing to provide an alarming shift of scale which is nonetheless at every turn related to these minutiae."
—David Grundy, review of Story One in Streams of Expression
About the Author
Ryan Dobran lives in Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the chapbooks The Last Shyness (Face Press, 2017), The Meritocrat (Shit Valley, 2017), and Shouts from OK Glamour (Barque Press, 2013), among others. He is the editor of The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne.
Visit the author's site [here].