Farewell My Dudes

Book excerpt: Poetry, when encountered unexpectedly, can be unexpectedly loved. One might love it accidentally.¿Mandy KahnUsing the ancient Japanese art form of haiku as his weapon of choice¿author Johnathan Rice dissects and disrupts, blasting our collective feed with razor sharp socio-political satire and insightful culture commentary. From the chaotic state of American politics to the labyrinthine emotional landscape of a Tinder date¿his debut book of poetry addresses all the vacuous ennui of the modern world.A singer-songwriter signed to Reprise Records in 2003, Rice has been recording and producing music ever since. In 2016 a shift in his life led him to move from a leafy home in Laurel Canyon to a rougher, weirder existence in Echo Park.Spending hours on the Instagram app, Rice eventually came to see it as a form of social hieroglyphics. This ignited a personal creative experiment, as Rice began populating his feed with words, all on an app usually reserved for images.The result was a series of what he dubbed his "dystopian haikus,¿ and what became a cathartic, therapeutic method of using humor and poetry to comment on what he feels may be a disintegrating culture ¿ and his own complicity in it. Farewell My Dudes is a specially curated selection of Rice¿s 2016-17 Instagram posts, each of them a 3 line, structured syllabic wonder. Sly, witty and unexpectedly poignant¿Rice¿s dystopia is simultaneously insightful and hilarious, an assortment of keenly observed statements about life, music, art, social media, brunch and of course¿love.Edited by Jessica Hundley & J.C. Gabel Introduction by Mandy Kahn Designed by Taylor Giali Hat & Beard Press #11