On Linh Dinh’s Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax Press, 2009)
For months now I’ve been thinking of Linh Dinh the photographer and not the poet. That’s because he’s been busy posting almost daily updates on State of the Union, his photoblog devoted to documenting the lower half of our body politic. Mostly taken in and around Philadelphia, Linh’s documentary photos are dispatches from the frontiers of American decline. Seen at street level, shot on his nerve, & uploaded onto the computer screen, Linh’s photos capture: our contemporary hieroglyphs of graffiti, signs, billboards, and ads; our public spaces of sidewalks and alleyways, bus stops and subways, parks and tent parks; and most importantly, they capture the people who create and inhabit them, especially the dispossessed and transient, going about their daily life along the margins of Center City. So when I drove down from Madison to Chicago the other week for Linh’s reading at Myopic Books I was happily reminded of Linh Dinh the poet.
