Alex Houen Books

Exploring the cultural aftermath of terrorism, this book offers a unique perspective on how acts of violence shape societal narratives and individual identities. It delves into the impact of terrorism on literature, media, and art, examining how these forms respond to and reflect the complexities of modern terror. By analyzing various case studies, the author highlights the interplay between trauma and creativity, revealing how communities process their experiences and redefine their narratives in the wake of violence.

By outlining a novel concept of literary practice, 'potentialism', this book shows how opening up literary possibilities enabled writers such as Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Lyn Hejinian to tackle matters of power and politics.

Poetry. A beautiful, formidably intelligent yet profoundly inviting book, Alex Houen's much-anticipated RING CYCLE brilliantly orchestrates its many motifs across poems that move from the metaphysical to the intimate to the droll sometimes within one poem. Houen is a poet of lavish linguistic sensuality, his poems vibrating with his attunement to fissures within the self, between lovers; salutes to friends; romantic skirmish; the ambient dread of our moment. Houen's brilliantly mash-upping mind encompasses pirated DVDs, Dryden and Alexander McQueen, conceits poetic and contemporary and untimely and unheimlich. A book of enormous range, simultaneously lush and austere, RING CYCLE tracks the perversities of erotic and filial suspension alongside questions of conscience and aesthetics.