Lip Service

At nearly 400 pages in length, Lip Service is Bruce Andrews' major poetry work of the 1990s. The book is divided into ten 'planets' corresponding to the ten 'bodies' of the Paradiso, each of which is in turn divided into ten sections. Andrews draws on resonances between the semiotic rubble of late capitalist society (overheard or found phrases and words gathered over a four-year period, then meticulously organized and edited) and Charles Singleton's translation of Dante to create a bleak vision of a contemporary world where vanity and self-regard are paramount, love is nothing but pretense and dissimulation, and mutability and immutability are inverted.