In JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks 2019), Danielle LaFrance combines poetry and autotheory as a means of targeting ideological infatuation, spilling into an obsession with ideological abolishment. JUST LIKE I LIKE IT searches for ways to kill and abolish “it,” seeking means to get it done right, even when attempted slowly and stupidly, even if the only way out is death.
LaFrance draws on stupidity, sadomasochism, pretend power, parasitism, and violent revolutionary desubjectification to shape a felt experience, not so much asking as inhabiting a series of questions, including: “What are the implications of abolishing the self as it is racialized, gendered, and classed?” and “Can a theoretical framework hold every contradiction in tandem when every contradiction is substantial and felt?”
Each page of JUST LIKE I LIKE IT pokes “it” awake all over again, culminating in a number of accomplished failures, including “It Makes Me Iliad,” a reworking of Homer’s Iliad. Poetry, it seems, is the best weapon for wiping it out with fewer casualties – which is why it is never enough.
“In “JUST LIKE I LIKE IT” Danielle LaFrance’s newest book of poetry, the subjective and embodied experience are weaved with a theoretical edge that transgresses convention and boundary. When I read Danielle’s work, I feel like I’m being digested by the text — the poetry is acidic and creates a somatic spasm while also assisting the reader to metabolize and clarify contemporary philosophy. Her writing faces political abstraction, affective life and the impossibility of writing in the political present asking “where did I come from and why must I continue to knock ”