Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late-late-night-snack capitalism. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture, and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of consumption and the formal device of the list. The numbers and statistics that fill the book stand as a critique of the grotesquely inhumane scales of capitalist production today — in-kind retort to the brutality of economic-fundamentalist abstractions that increasingly determine policy and regulate inner lives. Incisive humour permeates Buffet World. The poems capture Mancini's diamond wit, as well as his dissatisfaction with the conditions of a world built on so many systemic cruelties. Buffet World underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimisers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with a surreal spectacle of false hope. The images in Buffet World are colourful and almost garish. The words are, in true Mancini fashion, brilliantly manipulated. Equally concerned with the violence done to our planet, our bodies and imaginations, these poems perform a deep critique, but remain accessible and fun to read.

Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks, and visual art. His books and chapbooks include Snowline (2015), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006), and Ligatures (2005). Notable exhibitions of Mancini’s visual artworks have included exhibitions through Artspeak, Western Front, Gallery Atsui, Malaspina Printmaker’s Society, and CSA. He performed with Gabriel Saloman in their noisepoetry/noisecomedy/noisemusic ensemble in the 2013 LIVE! Biennale of performance art, and as part of Concrete Scores at Open Space.Mancini’s published critical writing includes work on the archive, time, and memory in Anamnesia: Unforgetting (2011), and a discourse analysis of poetry reviews in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012). His previous full-length book, Loitersack (New Star, 2014), is a labyrinthine commonplace book where critical, theoretical, and paraliterary tendencies intersect in the forms of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, laugh particles, and many, many questions. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia.Talonbooks published his poetry book Same Diff in 2017.

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