The Totality Cantos
Brian Ang
Atelos 2022

Complete text
Borrow: LINK+ | San Francisco Public Library
Purchase: Author | Eastwind Books of Berkeley | Pegasus Books | Small Press Distribution

The 2008 economic crisis and global backdrop of struggles by 2011 renewed possibilities for thinking totality, materializing it for apprehension. Ang wrote The Totality Cantos out of a desire to be interested in everything, sampling from discourses of history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities, all offering knowledges of what constitute totality. This major work is constructed along the principles of assemblage poetics, and exemplifies constructive verse: writing adequate to apprehending totality.

The Totality Cantos generator randomizes assemblages of the poem’s one thousand sections. Programming by Alif Sajan and Franz Fernando.

The Totality Cantos is Brian Ang’s first book.

David Lau, Avant-Garde Then and Now: 2023 Poetry Chronicle, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 16 (2024)
a j carruthers, How AXIS may relate to Brian Ang’s The Totality Cantos and the idea of an “assemblage poetics”, Assemblage Sampler (April 5, 2023)
Lyn Hejinian on Publishing The Totality Cantos (August 20, 2022)

totalitycantos@gmail.com | Instagram | PennSound
Current poetic project: A Thousand Records, open to the totality of music. | Totality of Music and 151-165 | 166-170 | 196-200
Editor: ASSEMBLAGE

Meet our Friends Bookstore Manager, Brian Ang! At the Library (November 2023)
Assemblage: Durback, Lo, Mosconi, Townsend and Ang, cruse, Ebenkamp, Hunter (September 16 and 17, 2023)
Process Note #23: Totality, Assemblage, Multiplicity (September 1, 2023)
Assemblage Sampler (April 2023)
Lone Glen: Utter Assemblage with Brian Ang, Aditya Bahl, and David Lau (February 15, 2023)
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brian Ang (February 8, 2023)
Brian Ang and Anne Lesley Selcer at Your Mood Gallery (January 7, 2023)
Assemblage Poetics, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry 36: Art (December 2022)
Brian Ang’s Favorite Books, Peach Mag (November 22, 2022)
Brian Ang and Caleb Beckwith at Woolsey Heights (September 24, 2022)
The Totality Cantos: Brian Ang and Alex Abalos on the Avant-Garde (August 20, 2022)
Interview with Cheryl Truong for Eastwind Books of Berkeley (August 2022)
Post-Crisis Poetics (April 2017)
Brian Ang with Caleb Beckwith, The Conversant (November 2016)
Post-Crisis Poetics, ARMED CELL 10 (April 2016)
Post-Crisis Poetics: David Lau’s “Communism Today”, ARMED CELL 5 (August 2013)
ARMED CELL (2011-2017)