A complex and multifaceted reckoning with literary and cultural lineage, Mike Lala’s The Unreal City locates our moment, and reimagines what we might make of it, by subjecting the history of literature to a radical détournement.

Mike Lala grew up in the western United States and Tokyo, and lives in New York. He is the author of Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016) and chapbooks including Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama (2016), In the Gun Cabinet (2016), and Points of Return (2023). Lala’s sound installations, performance, and libretti include Whale Fall (2021), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), Oedipus in the District (2018–19), and Infinite Odyssey (2018). He has presented work at the 92nd Street Y (for Anne Carson’s Tenth Muse), The Knitting Factory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, National Sawdust, New Ohio Theatre, Pioneer Works, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, The Tank NYC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.