In Andrew Brooks’s poetry, someone is always playing music, always reading poetry, there are always snacks (toasted almonds, citrus fruit, a pot of dal or stew simmering). There is dancing and crying. In Year of the Ox (2025), Brooks quotes the poet Rainer Diana Hamilton, who tells us:

Brooks puts this claim into practice as an axiom for the poetry of the future—a communist future horizon of embodied human flourishing that Brooks and others call the “commune.” The late Joshua Clover—to whom the book is dedicated, and who loved more than anything to sing the beautiful songs of his eras—said that the commune is the name of the struggle to preserve communal life, and that “this struggle has two faces. Militancy and care”—not opposed to each other, but as one. In Year of the Ox, the poetry of the future can be imagined as a songbook that “passes through all ports of the logistical world.” This songbook is comprised of “sea shanties of a world inverted”—that is to say, our world of unravelling hegemony. The year of the Ox is a year, says Brooks, “that marks the beginning of the end.” A sequence begins:

It was also the year of the Ox in 1997, which brought us the global financial crisis, and 2009, the year following the global economic collapse.

The book is a long poem about our Long Crisis: part red epic, part dream diary. The last section, titled “Dream Gig” is a serial sequence, in the style of Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” about an imagined cover band named Marxist Traitor Child. Marxist Traitor Child plays in the phantom space cast between the tall shadow of the American Century and a future, communist society. They cover Bad Brains covering Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” or Nina Simone covering Bad Brains “Banned in DC” or Toussaint L’Ouverture setting fire to the French flag. They are also the unacknowledged writers of Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop.” Marxist Traitor Child is the music of a world in stagnation, and of its transformation problem.

Year of the Ox is oriented by, on the one hand, the collapse of manufacturing and industrial profits held in the name “1973” (also known as “deindustrialization,” “Post-Fordism,” or “neoliberalism”), and, on the other hand, by that genre that is able to sing this new arrangement of history, namely, pop and its paradigmatic form, the pop song. Pop music—and most singularly, pop R&B—supplies the utopian movement of imagining the material conditions of what might come after our overdeveloped, oil-centered capitalist world. (“Sink Mumbai, sink Miami, sink Tchukarmboli, sink Comilla, sink,” Brooks writes.) For Brooks, “[t]he alchemy of the three minute pop-song is that it is a container for all that is uncontainable.”

Year of the Ox alludes to songs including those of Mariah Carey, Arthur Russell, Sly and the Family Stone, Prince, Portishead, Nina Simone, Elton John, Alice Coltrane, The Staple Singers, Rihanna, and Janet Jackson, among others. On the one hand, this is simply the music that turns him on. But, as the epigraph of the book from Fredric Jameson demands, we must “Always historicize!” Brooks’s musical taste in Year of the Ox is specifically and largely African American, and he hears in these songs the sounds of deindustrialization in the global core, with its feminizing, racialized and racializing effects, and its utopian/dialectical reversal. But this geographically and generically specific musical choice, situated within Brooks’s global political consciousness, is born of a peculiar contradiction: the poet loves the American Century—even though he knows it must be annihilated. Most of all, Brooks loves “the exuberant affirmations of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope,” which Richard Wright once said about the blues, and which Brooks can still hear in late style pop R&B.

Some sequences in the book begin with topology and a stadium singing “Purple Rain” in 1985, another year of the Ox. This singing, Brooks says, “sounds like whistles and bells and voices folding in on each other”; in other words, he hears a portal to a “higher,” non-capitalist social modality. For Brooks, it’s not about saying something new, per se, but rather of putting things into new juxtapolitical relations or, as Brooks puts it, “intimate cohabitation.” In one sequence, the poet dreams he has transformed into Janet Jackson and that Jackson’s voice becomes through some alchemical conversion Rosa Luxemburg’s.

The opening sequence of Year of the Ox begins with the poet’s daughter:

This sequence is mesmerizing precisely because of its ordinariness. The daily rhythms of life and care are the real chemistry, the magical thing, of Brook’s poetry. Everyday life is not turned upside down but, rather, is revealed to be the very conditions of collective flourishing.

The idea of commune is in a sense the inverted form of gender; in contrast to gender as, what Brooks calls, “an engine of [capitalist] accumulation,” the idea of commune “promises the accumulation of affinities and pleasures and genders.” Named after a tweet about the likes of Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, or Ed Miliband, “the Marxist Traitor Child” is, in Brooks’s inversion, “attached to the child rather than the parent; in other words, they are a traitor to themselves.” The Marxist Traitor Child—which in different moments Brooks suggests means us—means to be in solidarity with children, which is also the name of Madeline Lane-McKinley’s recent book, where she links the history of the ultraleft—famously referred to by Lenin as an “infantile disorder”—to utopianism and dedicates her book to “those who once were / or continue to be children / and let that be all of us.” Brooks writes: “the beauty of children is that they all know the lines of Diane Di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letter #19’: ‘Remember you can have what you asked for, ask for / everything.’” Communism, in other words, is for kids.

The poet hails both from the past and the future of revolution. In the surreal time-space of Year of the Ox things don’t end, they turn back on themselves “[l]ike the ouroboros or a haze that never lifts.” In a particularly alchemical sequence, which evokes Marx’s chapter on “The Working Day” in Capital, the poet writes:

These are sensual poems about the long, spiralling movement of history. He continues:

Ultimately Brooks is talking about the limits of the working body. He goes on to tell us that “[i]n its original form, the lustre [margarine] was beef tallow churned with milk to make a drab grey substance.” Yet, “[p]alm oil came to replace beef tallow in the food of the working poor.” Drawing from an official report,

He concludes:

Brooks’s vision of the commune is a poetic form echoing and re-echoing the circular shape of “compounding crises and the forms of our shared resistance,” tracing the circular sounds of pop. The discrepancy between a global political horizon (“the abolition of town and country, north and south”) and a soundtrack that is emphatically African American is worth returning to. It is, after all, the ring road of the book. For Brooks, this music is “tuned to the spatial question / of utopia. Music amidst terror.” He says: "[l]isten and you might hear: arise, wretched of the earth in all our songs.” The book is held by a dream, ultimately, “the end of misery as the wish to be fulfilled.” In it the conditions of pop music contain “the secret of circulation,” from which the poet imagines the spread of a future communist movement, what he calls “a common wind blowing from port to port.” It anticipates the emergence of, to borrow the phrase of Fred Moten, “the new international of rhythmic feel/ings.” Black radicalism, heard in the margins of pop R&B, provides the poet a cosmic, vibrational field. “Meanwhile,” he says, “nonproduction piled up inside the sytem and the world became a slum.” “Nonproduction” here meaning the lumpen, the informalized, the surplus population. As “future forecaster,” he speculates that, as the world increasingly becomes a slum, Black radicalism will increasingly become a crucial resource for all those who want to end settler capitalism and its mode of racialized inclusion/exclusion. Brooks is a DJ of the world commune, reassembling for us what it means to be “surplus”—which we might call surplus pop. “[S]ay the magic words: / to the motherfucking sea.”