Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan-Guyana Paperback – October 15, 2008

This is a totally delightful book, and one of those "Damn, why didn't I think of that?" ideas. The poems are lovely -- sometimes delightful, sometimes cringeworthy, often revealing deeper insights of how we travel to, imagine, and assign value to various places. Or ignore them completely -- the blank pages are always a surprise. It would be interesting in a sequel to see if anyplace could remain unmentioned, now that the internet has only grown exponentially. Ara, please keep going!

If it's not in the product description: in the book Shirinyan uses Google search results for "(a given country) is great" as material for the poems here. Shirinyan works within the world of conceptual writing and/or "flarf" depending on how you look at it, and that's a lot to get into here but suffice to say that this is experimental writing, but the experiment is both very revealing about how nationalism and tourism work on the internet and is really entertaining to read. Shirinyan is great at reshaping Google search results into poems and my only disappointment is that there hasn't been a followup book yet with more countries.