Poets and Killers

Advertising constructs us, always addressing, You. But who is this person, this you that advertising addresses? Poets and Killers answers this question by telling the life story of a man through advertising. Beginning in the 1940s when he is born, working up to 2009 when he dies, Poets and Killers uses lines taken directly from advertisements to write the main characters biography. This book examines what it means to be an individual in a world where we are all sold the same individuality, exploring what possibilities for a non-utilitarian humanity still exist between the lines of advertising copy. By using the language of advertising to create something fundamentally unmarketable and useless, that is, the story of a fallible human life expressed through experimental poetry, Poets and Killers shows that despite the pervasiveness of advertising and its efforts to rob us of the ability to express ourselves without commodifying ourselves, we can still speak.