Look Slimmer Instantly! Poems

Poetry is often thought of as a way to escape our blatantly commercial, media-ridden matrix of a world. But what if it turns out that poetry itself is just another media effect?

Sala’s poems explore this scary idea by feeding off the very media they critique. And in doing so, they make a discovery – that even our most mundane and oppressive ideologies are infected with the poetic.

Look Slimmer Instantly! covers a terrain that doesn’t often appear in poetry – from the worship of money, to the erotics of patriotism, to the profundities achieved by bad taste. On stage in this book, you’ll find apocalyptic allegories, the existential musings of porn stars, the deconstructive fury of self-help books – not to mention a glimpse of what poetry will look like when the genre acquires its first major ad campaign. Never above his material, the author’s tone throughout is gleefully crass, vulgar and nasty.

Sala was once praised as an "honorable hysteric" by poet/critic Peter Schjeldahl. This new book takes his provocations one step further, and offers entertainment, and poetry, of a high order.

Jerome Sala is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Corporations Are People Too! and The Cheapskates. His other books include Look Slimmer Instantly, Raw Deal: New and Selected Poems, The Trip, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, and Spaz Attack. He lives in New York with his wife, poet Elaine Equi.