Ryan fitzpatrick’s Fake Math is a poetic engagement with both the inanity of modern language and our parroting of that diction in a way that defines our public and private moments — in which we “come in for some criticism and/all [we] get is some hauling capacity.” Fake Math moves from crunk to spunk, from the proper noun to the step-down.

Fake Math is written in alternating short and long line sections of prose poems, with each section using the Internet as a compositional tool. These poems consist of our own voices spat back into our faces, with all the inanities, commodification, prejudices and stupidities intact. The result peels back the stupefying effect of mass language, and dares to ask, “If I get slutty, will I still heart bunnies and duckies?”

For example, in “My Pants won’t Fit,” fitzpatrick captures the language of frustrated dieters with a lasso of extra-fatty sausages. Few poets would dare to begin a poem with a cry of “damn sexy hamburger,” but fitzpatrick then stacks on extra patties, exploring the language around “fat porn,” “desexualizing the obese as/marginal. Lettuce is for losers. A norm/underlines form. Hot dog; ballet dancer.”

Fitzpatrick continues grinding language of self through the cogs of corporate mechanization. Throughout Fake Math, he underlines and celebrates the fallacy of personal accomplishment: “Do you own Victory, I mean,/if I tilt this game will you/ask me what I’m living for?”

Instead of a classical address to a natural world, fitzpatrick portrays our current age with a realistic aplomb rarely found in more traditional verse. Instead of addressing a muse, Fake Math’s poems open with such lines as “Dear Spongebob, how can I make a life from non-sequitors?” and “Dear Bigg Snoop Dogg, let’s reconsider/your archaic views on feminism.”

Fake Math dwells in the moments where the only vocabulary left to us to articulate our disgust is the very vocabulary that has been packaged and sold to us.

Breathing deeply the “exhaust in your vocabulary,” the exhaustion of a constricted vocabulary, fitzpatrick’s Fake Math is a major poetic event, redefining how we write and speak our bodies and our voices. The poet here is in the midst of an “Oprah spasm” — having come to the realization that “English is hard,” he’s left to yell into the void of our own skulls: “Echo, echo; ergo, ergo.”

In Fake Math, ryan fitzpatrick makes the hot dog dance. How do you like “them apples asshole?”