Mark Bibbins

Bibbins turns his eye to the American AIDS crisis with quiet consideration and dark wit, questioning personal loss amongst intolerance.

Thirteenth Balloon

"The book's a little crazy, packed with air quotes and brackets, jokes and condemnations, forms that explode across the page. Crazily enough, it's also packed with truth.”?NPR ?The voice of this third book from Bibbins is marked and numbed by the onslaught of American media and politics that saturate the Internet, television, radio, and smartphone: ?the way things are going, children/ will have to upgrade to more amusing.' Much like advertisements or news stories vying for viewer's attention, the book intentionally overwhelms, eschewing sections; the author instead differentiates the poems by repetition, creating a sort of echo chamber, similar to the way viral information cycles through social media platforms.”?Publishers Weekly,starred review "[Bibbins's] associative, oblique technique becomes the perfect table-turning weapon against the culture of mass distraction."?Boston Review The poems in Mark Bibbins's breakthrough third book are formally innovative and socially alert. Roving across the weird human landscape of modern politics, media-exacerbated absurdity, and questionable social conventions, this collection counters dread with wit, chaos with clarity, and reminds us that suffering is "small//compared to what?" Mark Bibbins teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University, and edits the poetry section of The Awl. He lives in New York City.

They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full

Poems examine life in the United States during the administration of George W. Bush with an emphasis on the ways the country changed, perhaps for the worse, during that period and on reactions to events of the time.

The Dance of No Hard Feelings

In his fourth collection, 13th Balloon, Mark Bibbins turns his candid eye to the American AIDS crisis. With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred— amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, “For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say.” And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing—through both joy and grief—to wonder.

13th Balloon

With beguiling tonal and formal variety, Mark Bibbins' poems constantly question the ordinary and unwitting acceptance of the status quo.

Mark Bibbins

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