Book Forty-Two

Weak Link

Rob Halpern

ISBN: 978-1-891190-42-1
Publication: 2019
Pages: 200

Rob Halpern teaches in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya, 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award; Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009); Music for Porn (Nightboat Books, 2011); Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015); and Weak Link (Atelos, 2019), as well as several chapbooks, including Weak Link (Slack Buddha Press, 2009) and Imaginary Politics (TapRoot Editions, 2008). With Taylor Brady, he also co-authored the book length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Displaced Press, 2011). Recent essays and translations appear in Chicago Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Claudius App. Rob currently splits his time between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Weak Link is an interstitial work containing poems, poem-essays, prose sequences, letters, translations, exercises, and manifestos. Everything collected in it has been recovered from the faults and cracks within and between four books—Rumored Place, Disaster Suites, Music for Porn, and Common Place—which together comprise one long serial work. No book can ever contain itself, so while the work included in WEAK LINK has not been moored to any of the aforementioned titles, it remains integral to the larger canvas this work exceeds.

A critical essay on Weak Link's title sequence, called "Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A Reading of Rob Halpern's Weak Link," by John Wilkinson, appeared in Chicago Review 55:2 (Spring 2010).