Product Description

Reading Tao Lin's poetry is like looking the wrong way down Frank O'Hara's ear trumpet at a 21st century Mayakovsky IM-ing Lili Brik. It's fun, smart, manic and ecstatic; it puts on a clean shirt before it loads the gun.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #435141 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Released on: 2006-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

Review
Reading Tao Lin's you are a little bit happier than i am (Winner of the 2005 December Prize) is reminiscent of covertly eavesdropping on a private conversation over a cup of hallucinogen-spiked black coffee. The reader cannot help but feel a little like a transfixed interloper. The poems are powered by direct, confessional statements which reveal the interior life of a twenty-something year old who is an alternately suicidal and homicidal, infatuated, self-conscious and self-loathing, ambivalent observer/poet. --Aysha Somasundaram, Bookslut.com

Tao Lin's you are a little bit happier than i am is poetry unadorned, offering a stark portrait of our modern world and its alienation. Pulling no punches, and drawing the reader in with seemingly simple statements, Tao Lin is one of the most inventive and insightful authors I have read this year. --www.largeheartedboy.com

Tao Lin's poetry collection gracefully proves the theorem that nothing can be truly sad if it isn t also funny...Lin's is a harsh, insular world of sadness (the word appears countless times throughout the slim volume), hopelessness and despondency. But for every ounce of drear and self-pity, Lin inserts an arresting aside: this poem has all this between each stanza / ...someone on the largest dose of tylenol cold in the history of the world falling off a sixty-story building at night." --Jeb Gleason-Allured, Timeout Chicago

About the Author
Tao Lin was born in 1983. This is his first book. His short story collection Bed and the novel EEEEE EEE EEEE are both forthcoming form Melville House. He keeps a blog at http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com

Customer Reviews

!!!
you can tell when you've been reading tao lin. you look at the world differently, you mood is different. its hard to describe, but its definitely worth reading.

Uniquely Enjoyable
Motifs in _you are a little happier than i am_ include emails, fruit, hamsters, loneliness, beauty, and sadness--what would have been a difficult and problematic combination of objects and abstract terms in the hands of a less talented poet. Tao Lin, however, links these elements effectively with plain, frank language that conveys immediate feelings and observations, often with sympathetic or humorous results.

The surprising concerns in these poems range from the personal to what many readers may resonate with. For example, in the poem "thanksgiving," Lin writes:

i feel most comfortable around middle-class japanese people
i know they are all thinking the same things as me

WHY ARE THE LINES SO LONG?
WHY AM I IN NEW JERSEY?

though their faces appear calm
their thoughts are exactly like i just put them
(Lin)

It does not seem to matter here whether the people are middle-class Japanese or middle-class any-other-American-or-foreigner. Lin points out how anyone might feel in this situation: the lines are long, and (more philosophically) why New Jersey? The contrast between calm faces, yelling interior monologue, the poet himself and Japanese people proves humorous when one reads Lin's conclusion to the poem "we just want to get our food/ and eat it/...and go to sleep."

An uniquely enjoyable, highly recommended collection. Tao Lin's other books include Bed, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

a little tiny bit racist.
ok. well.
this book started out a little strong.
i really wasn't expecting that.

i mean JESUS.

an AXE &a CELL PHONE?

too many things. too soon.

but then
it got a little racist
against spacemen.

and that's good
because i hate
spacemen.