Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Poetry. Fitterman’s newest book drags Edward Gibbon’s historical explorations into the parallel morass of today’s mass marketing and consumerism, where Roman Art becomes Airbrush, Roman transportation becomes Bubble Wrap. The third book of Fitterman’s long poem Metropolis, METROPOLIS XXX is composed of “found” text, but unlike many poems of that type it also achieves a sustained and consistent critique of contemporary culture. “Instead of restating the fall of the Roman state in words of his own, Fitterman speaks only in the readymade discourse, found by chance, verbatim, amid the ruins of the imperial, American marketplace”–Christian Bok.