Katamari Damacy is, as many of the franchise’s followers might tell you, more than just a game. The premise—wherein the player rolls a sticky ball around the screen to collect all of Earth’s objects to turn them into stars (while chipper Japanese pop music encourages you to do so with love and cheer in your heart)— is as bizarre as it sounds. A good friend of mine introduced the delightfully eccentric video game to me as a life philosophy, as a means of rolling everything in your life—good and bad—into a ball, and throwing it back to the space from whence it came.
It was, therefore, not much of a surprise when I happened upon a book of poems loosely based on the concept. Ander Monson’s collection, The Available World offers up a delectable sample of contemporary poems with an eye to language, space, technology, and, of course, the ever-rolling katamari. Despite hailing from a non-speculative press, the collection, and Monson himself, is rife with science, science fiction, and science fiction references. Just imagine if Douglas Coupland had a literary boner for Wil Wheaton and video games, and go from there.
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