Perfect-bound. 48 pp, 9 x 7 in.
Publication Date: 2012
Shipping November 2012
Book party Nov. 16, 2012 at Printed Matter, Chelsea, NYC.
Jointly-produced by poets Paul Legault, Andrew Durbin, and designer
Joseph Kaplan, Mall Witch is the first full-length collection of poems by
Ben Fama, an emerging voice in the Brooklyn poetry scene whose work
explores the frayed border between his first life and his second.
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR MALL WITCH
Maybe Dennis Cooper and Jeff Clark and Eileen Myles and a few other divinities paved the way for
some of Ben Fama's smartly contemporary tone, but the result is all his own: funny, horny, blasé,
insouciant, complicated, allusive, and bristling with mixed messages--like a Baudelairean Dionysus
incarnated as a reticent anesthesiologist under house arrest for unspeakable, thrilling crimes.
--Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx.
A text whose origins are mysterious as a mood ring, Mall Witch's strange teenage magic is as much
Facebook and tumblr as it is Brooklyn's makeshift clubs and pop-up art galleries. Fama's lyric-
meme love poems evoke a present already passing, casting their spell with a winky smiley and "pearls
on a thin wrist. That's as far as [they'll] go."
--Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment
The last day anybody had a right to be bored in the 21st century was the day before Beyonce made
a Tumblr. Taking a paratactic plunge off of that Niagara Falls of content: past smiling yachts, royal
photos of a bread called “Hovis,” fleeting grasses, one feels profoundly that heaven has become a
place on earth. Even if it is, finally, Beyonce’s world and we just happen to live in it, Mall Witch makes
a claim for our own magnificent productions of glorious ephemera. Perhaps they are only glorious as a
crystalline booger that uncannily resembles Obama or, like, being in love. But Mall Witch understands
profoundly that glamour means enchantment, and enchantment is a virus. As we learn what
consequences our technologies have on our mobile, booger-holding, bodies IRL, we’re going to need
works like Mall Witch to be our mirror.
--Brandon Brown, author of Flowering Mall
Which witch bewitches us in Ben Fama's Mall Witch? Which twitchy young thing, which moll, might
troll this mall? Fama's work suggests a flaneur of the twenty-first century, equally disposed to wander
the virtual landscape of hyper-smooth curves that backdrops these pages (designed by Paul Legault
and Joseph Kaplan) as the hallways and food court of Westfield Shoppingtown. The book's design and
text are inseparable, making a catty chatterbox that wears its influences on its sleeve: Ariana Reines
and Kate Durbin become brands alongside Four Loko, IKEA, and Blackberry. Part homage, part inside
joke, these poems poke a manicured fingernail in this moment of self-presentation, self-consciously
dating themselves because, in true Narcissistic fashion, they would like to date themselves.
--Amaranth Borsuk, author of Between Page and Screen
“The immediacy of a tender escapade as it arrows into your ardent third eye, it’s here within
the MALL WITCH, a window into the soul you thought you had ahold of. Ah, there’s a poet behind this
mirror big enough for two. Before I die / I want you to be new. It wasn’t just a nice plan, it was a
fucking miracle, so eat now and drink!! Don’t be stupid by your jaw, come to know this as another
real poetry!! Don’t even run, just let the MALL WITCH nail you!!”
--CAConrad, author of The Book Of Frank, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon:
New (Soma)tics