Joshua Clover
Joshua Clover (b. 1962, Berkeley, California) is a California-based poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA; his first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. John Ashbery wrote of Madonna anno domini, “Private passions charged with awareness of the upheavals and conflagrations of our time find utterance in Joshua Clover’s brilliant first collection of poems. His voice is truthful, tender, caustic, and elegiac all at once; the results are breathtaking.” Judith Butler called his second book of poems, The Totality for Kids, a “stunning collection” in which “the fragmented world of a late and lost modernity has its own moving and lucid affect, its forms of aliveness. We encounter here an enormous clarity of language in the service of a poetics that brilliantly queries our historical moment in and as form.”
A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Clover is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999-2000. He is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, and is a former senior writer for Spin. His film criticism includes a book on The Matrix for the British Film Institute, and the Criterion Collection essays for Band of Outsiders and Straw Dogs. His birth name was Joshua Miller Kaplan; via legal change, he took his mother’s maiden name His mother, Carol J. Clover, Ph.D., is the originator of the final girl theory and a professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.
Under the pseudonym “Jane Dark”, Clover has written a number of film and music reviews for The Village Voice [1], and maintains a blog entitled “jane dark’s sugarhigh!”
Works
* Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997) .
* The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2005)
* The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006).