A "genuinely transcendent" (The New Yorker) portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work. It's the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can't dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it's the company's new twenty-four-year-old CEO, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious months of the Trump administration, there's a sense that things are speeding towards collapse--and that they've perhaps been unraveling for some time.
Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: scenes from his own life, dreams, poetic fragments, stoned revelations, and broadly defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables: attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally tie together the disparate threads of his life, his poetry, and his labor. As the notebooks fill up over the course of two years, season by season, D__ circles a series of perennial questions about art and work, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes" (Kirkus, starred review), The Copywriter is a story following the absurd paths that office work can take us on and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.
About the Author :
Daniel Poppick is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, a winner of the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
Review :
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker "Tune[s] in to the metaphysical dimension of everyday suffering, articulating it with a metrical precision...One of The Copywriter's most moving aspects is its expansive definition of poetry, which admits bureaucratese and launch-party banter and could theoretically apply to any part of life...genuinely transcendent...Poppick's point isn't that everything matters, it's that anything might." --Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"Genre-wise, The Copywriter exists somewhere between a hangout film and a novel of ideas... By placing the fraught macro alongside the absurd micro, Poppick stages an argument about how our political and personal consciousnesses inform each other, and about the emotional whiplash of modern life." --Jonathan Russell Clark, The New York Times
"Very funny...There is a Seinfeldian quality to the novel, in its close attention to the small indignities and inconsistencies of daily life. ...Poppick's writing is nutritious, dense with ideas and references and questions." --Lora Kelley, Kismet Magazine
"By reclaiming language from its day job and returning it to the realm of poetry, D__ does more than just survive; he stages a quiet, persistent revolution." --Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
"The Copywriter is part office satire but also part poetics of absurdity, making use of the corporate world's vacuous jargon and ugly furniture. The question becomes: What can poetry do to transform or remake the dull day job--to make it bearable, make it interesting, or simply make it mean something else?" --The Nation
"Poppick provides a close-up view of the coexisting banality and drama of corporate America, which is rare in contemporary fiction. Through a season of professional and personal turmoil, D__ keeps a notebook to chart his evolving feelings about love and community, his identity as a poet, and the frustrations and unexpected delights he finds in salaried work...All the while, he contends with unanswerable questions about purpose, relationships, and the role of art in times of political and economic upheaval." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Clear and funny, wryly cynical without indulging in nihilism...runs the gamut from insouciance to elegance...Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Caustic and insightful about the pointlessness of contemporary labor, Poppick offers moments of profound comedy and wonderful turns of phrase throughout. A fascinating perspective on a specific period of recent history, this is a meditative and beautifully written debut." --Booklist
"Executed with the precision and perception of a poet... Utilizing an epistolary style, unfurling as a series of notebook entries, which include straightforward storytelling, poems, pithy observations, and black humor, the narrative is built upon two of the poet's greatest strengths: economy and a rapt attention for the seemingly insignificant." --Library Journal
"Reflective...funny...This portrait of a modern-day Bartleby is a blast." --Publishers Weekly
"Some of my favorite novelists are actually poets, and this now includes Daniel Poppick, who has written a stimulating and deeply pleasurable book that made me feel homesick for being a young person in New York and talking about literature with my friends, and also, weirdly, hopeful for the future. It takes the form of a set of notebooks, starting in the summer of 2017, into which a poet called D__, who daylights as a copywriter, dumps his observations, some scraps of poetry, various stories from his life, and his dreams, all with a highbrow sensibility and a winking sense of humor...A little bit Renata Adler, a little bit Ben Lerner...a little bit Maggie Nelson." --Emily Temple, LitHub
"I can barely remember the last time I read a book from beginning to end, but I tore right through The Copywriter. What a delight! A novel written with a poet's economy--a surprise, a joke, and/or an Idea in every line. Great value! Highly recommended."
--Elif Batuman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot "In this hilarious and utterly original novel of ideas, Daniel Poppick wrests words out of their day jobs and puts them back where they belong, in the realm of poetry. The Copywriter is a tour de force, drilling right through the feelings of horror and doom that attend life in our contemporary hellscape to reveal the meaning still pulsing underneath it all--like a dream waiting to be dreamt, or a bell asking to be tolled."
--Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
"The Copywriter is brilliant--a novel that reads at the pace of the thriller, with the thickness of meaning I expect from poetry. Its protagonist is a writer who is paid to make words feel dead, but who knows--even in the midst of the churning monotony of his task--that they will always find a way to live. Poppick's language is so playful, his attention to language so serious. I hung onto each clause, each clause propelled me into the next, and I emerged with a great deal of hope and inspiration, a desire to see the world with renewed curiosity, and to act in light of that curiosity, too."
--Maya Binyam, author of Hangman
