Lunar Hilton Elegy

"Description: In Lunar Hilton Elegy, Gabriel Palacios excavates the future we received in lieu of Conrad Hilton's proposed luxury resort on the moon: a surreal, systems-level sample-collage of "teenage Craigslist obstetricians," "efficiencies in care," and walls of fake foliage engineered to signify glamour. A future optimized to whatever the gray tomatoes at Walmart taste like. Defining what Palacios terms the vaporpoem, the collection moves through the artifacts of a boyhood suspended in the neon-noir dusk of 1989-home-taped Video Soul broadcasts, dead-mall architecture, late-night cable access-treating the past not as a home to return to, but as an improvised shelter against the present's digital weather. Writing from the "scramblevision" frequency of now, Palacios captures the sound of entertainment crosstalking with surveillance and web marketing-speak leeching into pillow talk and prophecy alike. These vaporpoems are peopled by the Internet OGs-those who remember entering the digital world with the optimism of a first day of school, only to be deposited in a dissolute landscape of "daiquirimachinelight" and outsourced violence. Across intercepted transmissions-video court feeds, in-store music loops, canceled futurisms-Lunar Hilton Elegy asks what remains of the American myth when its "freshly planted tracts" resolve into blue photonic mist. At once darkly comic and urgently elegiac, the book offers a report from the threshold of the still-buffering all-at-once-or, more precisely, a lost-and-found, sunbaked cassette of that report, still playing"-- Provided by publisher.