Click and Clone

An innovative, whimsical exploration of the effects of technology on everyday life.

Click and Clone explores the tone and timbre of American life as it has been colored by the new metaphors and images brought to us by our continuing technological revolution. Equi is interested in a new form of realism—one that acknowledges the fact that what we think of as normal and everyday is now permeated with the fantastic. These poems draw on the conventions of science fiction and surrealism. Clones, lucid dreaming, and a tarot deck constructed from old movie stills are just a few of the marvelously routine occurrences in this maze of interlocking worlds and poems. Whether she is writing about art, pop culture, consumerism, or reality TV, Equi does so with clarity and wit. As inventive as she is agile, this author is a true original.

Publication date: March 15, 2011

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 136 pages

ISBN: 9781566892575

Elaine Equi, author of Click and Clone, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and its outlying suburbs. In 1988, she moved to New York City with her husband poet Jerome Sala. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her last book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

Among her other titles are Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and numerous volumes of the Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.

“Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness.” 

—Entertainment Weekly

“Elaine Equi’s Click and Clone is poetry for the 21st century. . . . Her incisive wit and elegant nod at contemporary technology combine to create a poetry that is not only flamboyant but essential.” 

—The Journal

“This troubling topic, seemingly alien to a poetic sensibility, is indicative of Equi’s reach into the future. She also keeps the past magically alive.” 

—Brooklyn Rail

“Punchy and fast paced; saturated with an urban tang. . . . Modern yet staunchly accessible in their quirkiness, her poems feel alive.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Often less than a page, [Equi's] poems read something like eloquent one-liners that along with laughter effortlessly provoke profundity: a little Wang Wei, a little Frank O’Hara, a little Nicanor Parra, but mostly, just a little.”

—Guernica

“Elaine Equi seems to know all our foibles and, instead of edging toward the door, reports the latest developments with precise, loving equanimity. An electrified pleasure field.”

—Aram Saroyan

“These poetically altered texts punch holes into the multiverses of pop and splendor, short and longing, prose and dreams.”

—Charles Bernstein