Winner of the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
—Tyrone Williams, final judge
—Cathy Wagner
—Yusef Komunyakaa
"[A]n elegiac debut collection meant to be beheld and enacted. This provocative book is designed as an immersive experience, featuring verse that can be classified as poetry only in that it announces itself as such: this is performance, myth creation, and rally cry. In his understated confrontations with forms of societal violence—militarism, climate change, economic collapse—Lala attends to the musicality of language, seductively contrasting the lush with the sparse. . . . This a dense and challenging yet rewarding read; Lala engages with playful structural elements as he experiments with alternate means of interrogation and representation."
—Publishers Weekly
—Fanzine
"Lala’s book manifests these cumulative senses of our time, the dull, buzzing inescapable ache that arises when the weapons have come off the stage and constitute the real. . . . [Exit Theater] ultimately stages a new question, perhaps an inevitable question, for aesthetic work in these times of violence: what happens when Chekhov’s gun becomes a drone, a melting ice cap, a toxic algae bloom?"
—Jacket2
Selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Exit Theater casts classical elegy, with dazzling formal innovation, into a staggering work of contemporary, political polyphony. Through monologues, performance scripts, and poems of exquisite prosody, Mike Lala examines the human figure—as subject and object, enemy and ally—in the context of a progressively defigured and hostile world. Catullus, Shakespeare, Cy Twombly, and Lydia Delectorskaya echo across engagements with Israeli generals, accused terrorists, State Department employees, nuclear scientists, Saturday Night Live actors, war criminals, malware, and a host of mythic, literary, and half-extant spectral characters. Amid the cacophony, Lala implicates every actor, including himself, in a web of shared culpability vis-à-vis consumerism, representation, speaking, writing, and making art against the backdrop of the endless, open wars of a post–Cold War, post-2001 era. Exit Theater is a debut of and against its time—a book about war, art, and what it means to make art in a time of war.
