The Malady of the Century

Poetry. THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY is written as a swansong to a generation that has lost the will to perceive the linear progression of time; a generation that is a collapse of occasions, wherein no discernible or dominant motif is present because Now is the mixture of all times, when every trend that ever was is the current mode.

"Crossing platforms, from mirror to various pulsing LED screens and back, Jon Leon taps sublimity, rousing our daily patois to orgasm without interruption. THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY is a portrait of the artist as a young verb. Like R. Kelly coveringLes Chants de Maldoror."—Bruce Hainley

"Jon Leon has crafted a cold and funny porno-dystopia that 'sends up' poetry while also behaving like a strict modernist manifesto–a Stein or Pound reveille, with P.T. Barnum bravado, making it new. Reading THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY, I think of the dungeon (Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper); I also think of the penthouse (Joan Didion and Frederick Seidel). Leon's voice—if it is indeed a voice, or his— is charmingly post-sentiment; he evacuates poetry's resources in order to stage, with hilarious, memorable, deadpan showmanship, a bildungsroman of the artist-as-void. Leon's subject is the rôle of the 'poet,' a Rimbaud with the resumé of a Russ Meyer."—Wayne Koestenbaum

"This thick work is so blindingly over-the-top in how it hits on all the stuff the kids love these days, stuff that comes from a real place of daring integrity but can also land like callowness taken as a drug. Either way it's great, I inject it. Porn-intellect-fashion-longing and I heart flat-affect. Easy to imitate, hard to aspire to, and I'm trying it now."—Rebecca Wolff