Composed primarily through the co-optation and recombination of internet search results, FAKE MATH is a poetic intervention into the ways the motive for profit structures our lives. Each poem exposes the fallacies, fake logics, and sheer idiocies that constrict our decision-making processes in terms of our art, industry, educational system, and our day-to-day lives, while questioning our tendency to resort to institutionalized social violence. FAKE MATH draws its inspiration from diverse sources from Marx to Freud, from Archimedes to Oprah, sending them all downstream on rapidly pulsating waves of schizophrenic glee and political gravity, often creating startling juxtapositions when mismatched ideas and images are torn from their original contexts. The effects are at once humorous and stomach-churning. Ultimately, these are poems about how we live, work, and play within larger structures of capitalism and how our attempts to move past these structures are largely failed attempts at rebellion, not real attempts at revolution.
Recently moved to Vancouver, ryan fitzpatrick is a former editor of filling Station magazine and is one of the organizers of Calgary’s Choose Yer Own Festival. Recent work of his has appeared in The Capilano Review, Poetry is Dead, and the Enpipe Line Anthology. His most recent work is the chapbook 21st Century Monsters (Red Nettle Press, 2012). Fake Math is his first book-length collection.