Book Fifteen

Platform

Rodrigo Toscano

ISBN: 1-891190-16-6
Publication: 2003
Pages: 231

Rodrigo Toscano's Platform is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. It would be correct to read Platform as a triumphant product of precise and complex labor (thus adding to the tradition set by of Louis Zukofsky). But where the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach informed Zukofsky's work, we would suggest that it is the spirit of the Teatro Campesino that informs Toscano's — his poems carry out brilliantly creative interventions. The works is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and "unfuckingrightgaggable," Platform is victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity.

Rodrigo Toscano grew up in San Diego. After a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area working as a social worker and an activist within the labor movement, he moved to New York, where he continues this work. He is a nationally influential writer, whose work along the intersections of social and aesthetic activism is adding new dimensions to contemporary poetics.

Platform is Rodrigo Toscano's third book. His first book, The Disparities, was published jointly by Green Integer and O Books in 2002. His second book, Partisans (which, due to a variety of circumstances, came out before his first), was published in 1999 by O Books.