Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture and the politics of language, Mancini organizes his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of consumption and the formal device of the list. The numbers and statistics that fill the book stand as a critique of the grotesquely inhumane scales of capitalist production today in kind retort to the brutality of economic fundamentalist abstractions that increasingly determine policy and regulate inner lives. Incisive humor permeates BUFFET WORLD. The poems capture Mancini's diamond wit, as well as his dissatisfaction with the conditions of a world built on so many systemic cruelties. BUFFET WORLD underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimizers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with a surreal spectacle of false hope."
