MEADOWLANDS/XANADU/AMERICAN DREAM by Joshua Wilkerson

Paperback, 80 pp, 2022

Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream is an illuminated meditation 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, 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."

ISBN: 979-8-9886797-6-9
Beautiful Days Press/Urizen 2