Ten years later, after all the computer nerds have had the last laugh, Jon Paul Fiorentino turns to Thorstein Veblen's seminal social science text from 1899, . Veblen's book introduced to our culture the terms 'conspicuous consumption' and 'nouveau riche'; it identified a new demographic, the leisure class, and demarcated its position in culture. , then, is an art manifesto for the aesthetics and ethics of loser culture. If the Anthony Michael Hall character in wrote poems (and, deep down, you know that he did), they’d probably read a lot like . Drawing on texts ranging from Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking to (the nerd Bible) for inspiration, this carefully crafted suite of poems documents the tribulations and insecurities of everyone’s inner geek. Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburban Winnipeg, where a landscape of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video-game consoles serves as a mirror to the inner states of urban ennui among the socially inept and the culturally vexed. By turns compassionate, funny and filled with selfloathing, is never without the possibility of redemption; ‘And if a loser falls,’ says the narrator of ‘Right in the Spine,’ ‘I feel it.’ is the perfect soundtrack for the alienated and the hopeless.