Welcome our online reader’s companion for Ben Doller’s collection of poetry Fauxhawk. You will find analysis of Doller’s work, interviews with the poet, and other information that will further your understanding of the artist.
Ben Doller is the author of four books of poetry: Fauxhawk (Wesleyan 2015), Dead Ahead (Fence 2010), FAQ (Ahsahta 2009), and Radio, Radio (Louisiana State 2001), which was selected by Susan Howe as the recipient of the Academy of American Poet’s Walt Whitman Award. He was also the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and a Sony Scholar Award, among other honors. Doller earned a BA in English from West Virginia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He is an assistant professor of writing at the University of California in San Diego.
Fauxhawk, the newest title from Doller, works in the space where dissent becomes materialized, ironized, and commodified. Engaging drone optics, redactions, renditions, comedy, and cinema, Fauxhawk wrenches exuberant music from the drone of the everyday. The citizens in these poems are fraught in their passivity, both ashamed of being and of being surveyed. Occupied by the material forces conspiring against poetry, Fauxhawk takes on the economics of writing, university bureaucracies, and complicit injustice. The poems in Doller’s thrilling new collection attempt to find their own tone amid the blare via formal innovation, carving a space where presence is signified, in hopeful and clarifying resistance.
To order a copy of FauxHawk, visit the book’s page, here.
If you have any questions or experience any problems with our site, please contact selliott@wesleyan.edu.
