Ennui Sonnets, by Michael Perret

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Originally intended as occasional content for social media, and almost entirely written at work, Michael Perret’s Ennui Sonnets form a portrait of the poet at his day job, the “for what it’s worth” of his day to day. Largely dominated by fatalistic ruminations on the eight hours, but sometimes warmed by explicit daydreams of domestic bliss and the occasional thought about art, they reflect the passage of routine time, or as one of the sonnets names it, the endless apocalypse.

Through an assortment of sonnet forms, these 21 poems give expression to the boredom, frustration, weariness, horniness, love and longing, critique and seeming catastrophe of a bohemian in spirit spending his days lost in a cubicle, disconnected from his city, overly connected to his phone, and dealing with coitus interruptus. It is an art reduced to scribbles on a yellow sticky note, composed to a formal meter of sighs and the taps on a desktop keyboard, an art of ennui, in a word, and the ramifications of whatever comes after late stage capitalism.

Michael Perret is a poet and translator from Austin, Texas. His books include The Chimera and Other Dark Poems (2023), The Decadent Book of Babylon (2024), and his translation of Octavia, the Quadroon by Sidonie De La Houssaye (2021). He also provides vocals for the French Noise Rock duo Marking & Plating.