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 covering Les Chants de Maldoror.Bruce HainleyJon Leon has crafted a cold and funny pornodystopia that sends up poetry while also behaving like a strict modernist manifestoa 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). Leons voiceif it is indeed a voice, or his is charmingly postsentiment; he evacuates poetrys resources in order to stage, with hilarious, memorable, deadpan showmanship, a bildungsroman of the artistasvoid. Leons subject is the rle of the poet, a Rimbaud with the resum of a Russ Meyer.Wayne KoestenbaumThis thick work is so blindingly overthetop 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 its great, I inject it. Pornintellectfashionlonging and I heart flataffect. Easy to imitate, hard to aspire to, and Im trying it now.Rebecca Wolff