Partyknife

Dan Magers

Published in 2012, Partyknife, the debut book of poems by Dan Magers, captures the zeitgeist of the first decade of 21st-century hipster Brooklyn – the good and the bad. Toggling between passionate intensity and numbing despair, the poems utilize disjunctive and associative logic to portray the unnamed speaker’s night journeys through bars and parties, pedestrian workdays, and most especially his relationship with members of Partyknife, a band he may or may not have ever been a part of. The “jump cuts” in each sonnet-sized poem create sudden shifts in tone and register, representing overheard chatter, interior monologue, lyric utterance, vulgarity, and seeming transcendent inspiration. Does the speaker in the poems want to be cool or mock it? By turns tender and in your face, the poems are accessible but genuinely experimental.

Print: $15 PDF: $5

What People Are Saying

Thurston Moore

Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile.

Sarah Manguso

“I wanted to be high, but now I'm trapped in my life." Frustrated by the limits of his world, Partyknife's youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. “Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am." These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life.

Blake Butler

Partyknife is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren't allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, “the future."

Inside the Book

Category:: Poetry
Binding:: Perfect Bound 92pp
Dimensions: 7" x 7"
Publication Date:: June 2012
ISBN:: 9780982617779

Watch the Trailer

Reviews

Blake Butler
Vice

Publisher's Weekly
Publisher's Weekly

Matthew Zingg
The Rumpus

Partyknife fashions itself as a mix tape—by definition disjunctive, a patchwork that requires a specific lens—about Pratt parties, drinking games, grudge fucking and oblivion. Whoever is holding the partyknife (all poems composed by D. Magers) is steeped in the sort of decadence and condescension associated with young, urban creative types, the usual hipster schlep, all the while stumbling onto abrupt and often absurd realizations: “The punk kid in the punk house laughs at the paint he wipes on my new shirt,/but I am an insane god." But beneath his brash announcements (“I'm the Jesus of making out with girls drunk") and shoulder-shrug fatalism (“And when I die, I'll just be dead") there is an uneasy relationship between these poems and the world they inhabit, one overburdened by self-importance and skepticism.

Russel Swensen
Southeast Review

RS
The Aviary

Farrah Field
Adultish

Last night I dreamt about a poem called "Indie Message Board" by Dan Magers. Dan Magers isn't like any poet you know. His aesthetic is young--in the sense that he knows more about the real world than the real world--and simultaneously aged--everything one needs to know about changes so awfully fast. His range of existential hopelessness and sexual promiscuousness/artful deviance conjoins pop culture and hipsterdom in a space of poetry that reassures you that you no longer have to feel guilty about all those weird Youtube videos you watched, that guy's dick you saw hanging out of his dress, or when you touched that sleeping girl's arm in the New Museum. Poetry as Antonioni (the old man said that). Poetry Foucault. Poetry as a long party. Poetry as Ecstasy, post-Ecstasy, with a hint of Denis Johnson.

From the Book

Meaning contains a glancing similarity

to what is happening to me.

I love my liberal friends. I am a liberal.

The Marlboro Man in his prime
given free cigarettes, so why not smoke them?

Just keep making your clown music for retards.

Your hard-earned success flowers only jealousy.

Today, I implicated three friends in reveries

of fanciful rage. You're the friend that gets me

seventy-five percent.

We got addicted to snorting 9/11 dust
and listened to the feel good hits of Generation X.

Total Summer Vibe

When you said Pratt party, I heard frat party.

The punk kid in the punk house laughs at the paint he wipes on my new shirt,

but I am an insane god.

My intern broke up with her boyfriend for me.

I did not ask for this. When she spoke
I saw your face.

Misheard lyrics of my favorite songs inextricably linked

to my love and that time.

Yeah, I love it the best.

Fetishize the moment into a lifetime.

Subscription probe - please ignore.