Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement!
The exclamation point is much maligned. It's bad style. It's like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it's hysterical, it's maybe even embarrassingly obsequious.
Nasser Hussain disagrees! What's so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of 'style' can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself!
The Point is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang's and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let's celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!
'A riotous delight, The Point is the next chapter in Nasser Hussain's ongoing poetic project to unsettle our sense of what language is and what it can do. Working on a canvas at once minute and expansive, these poems play with ideas of scale, emphasis, and representation: reading them, I had the sense now of walking through a Borgesian gallery, now of flying through space, now of burrowing into my own body's interior. Hussain should reach his widest audience yet with this fantastic blend of concrete experiment, dismantle-the-box wit, and philosophical excavation.' – Sarah Howe, author of Foretokens
'I !!!! !!!! !!!!. !!!! !!! (Translation: I love this book. Read it!)' – Simina Banu, author of I Will Get Up Off Of
'The exclamation mark is the mark of our hypersaturated zeitgeist! Even the exclamation mark needs an exclamation mark!! Or another!!! The exclamation mark presupposes the exclamation Luke! John! and Matthew! The reclamation mark! The friedclamation mark! The lamentlamation mark! The exclamation mark is the interrobang for our times since we no longer mark questions because these days it's ALL! questions! And excalamity!! Nasser Hussain exclaims, reframes, inflames and amazes in his investigation of this most emphatic vatic mark! This book is a lark but it is also a harpy: What do we claim!? What do we exclaim!? What do we/can we make (mark) serious?! How does writing vie for attention and notate the spiking of our overstimulated amygdala?!?! It's all here!!!! That's The Point! Beauty! Strangeness!! Charm!!! Truth!!!! Feasturize ™ on this and I dare you not to exclaim, "Three quarks for Nasser Hussain and his Muster Mark!!!!!"' – Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates
'A universal language in a good mood.' – Aram Saroyan, author of Before I Forget: A Memoir (and Then Some)
'!!!!!!! !!! ! !!!!!!!!! !!' – Derek Beaulieu, author of Surface Tension
'Confronting the sheer pointlessness of poetic wisdom for any given weighty moment, Nasser Hussain's The Point is an ingeniously exclamatory reminder of the point of marking the journey!' – Kimberley Campanello, author of An Interesting Detail
'Into our age of protest and complaint against global tyrannies comes this epic treatment of the zeitgeistiest of our punctuation marks, the punchiest of our tachygraphy. Nasser Hussain has imagined a satirical paean to the oddity and eloquence of the mercurial exclamation point in the most fascinating era of its usage. The Point is a witty, vibrant work of visual poetry that illuminates the contradictions of our reactivity to media culture as we swing between paralysis and overwhelm and spin in the vortex of the attention economy. As the best poets do, Hussain renews our attention to language's ample and exquisite capacity, knocking it out of the narrow furrows of habit. We have in him an effervescent and limber
