MEADOWLANDS/XANADU/AMERICAN DREAM by Joshua Wilkerson

80 pgs, 2022

Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream is an illuminated meditatio which cracks open the “mall” as stale icon of horrific, repetitive emptiness to release the mystico-revolutionary potential latent in (dead) mall aesthetics. Bookended by a procedurally generated poem-prayer and a procedurally generated guided meditation, its central essay shuffles like a zombie flaneur, a microplastics-addled Arcades Project, a necropastoral shopping hallucination orbiting loosely around New Jersey’s troubled American Dream Meadowlands mall. Attractions within: mall-affect theory, readings of Dawn of the Dead and Severance, Dead Mall Youtube, the occult, a radical détournement of Paul Blart Mall Cop, and utopian visions of the mall after capital.

Besides all that, it gets personal. The mall is, after all, a form of autobiography: "Like a dying mall, the desires of childhood go on repeating themselves, sometimes eerily, sometimes embarrassingly in the background. Writing unearths them. The word mall: a spell, a radioactive dye which lights up the smallness of my distance, so detachment might collapse into whatever beneath it is real… Or, if a mall deserves love, anything can."

You can read an excerpt from the book’s central essay here.

You can also listen to an audio companion to the book here.