Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the "courage of paradoxical evocation." For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that "the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the 'surveillance-industrial complex' but also to the limitations of language's ability to fully articulate 'what work this dying is.'" In (un)mapping its state of accelerated becoming, this (collective) body asks whether it can, through radical re-narration of its (re)constitution by neo-liberal capitalism and militarism, allegorize the wider catastrophic affects these logic-systems have on an ecosystem. "Is it possible," asks Laura Elrick, "to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d?" As place, the occulted recursively struggles to perform exploratory surgery on normative valuations of its capacities, on what is taken to be possible and what is not.
Author Hometown: Olympia, WA USA
About the author: David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, a former union organizer, and participant in Nonsite Collective. His most recent books are OCCULTATIONS (Black Radish Books, 2010), Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVOX Books, 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth. 2010-11), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). Critical work on the poetics of the body and reclamation of public space has appeared in journals such as Jacket and Sibila: Poesia y Cultura (Brazil). Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College's Workshop In Language & Thinking. OCCULTATIONS is Wolach's first full-length poetry collection.
Reviews:
author blog
The Wheelhouse Arts Collective
Matthew Landis in Jacket
Nicky Tiso at Tarpaulin Sky Reviews
Mark Wallace at Thinking Again
Joe Milford Show [audio]
@ PhillySound [interview, reviews, etc.]
Inter(review) by Emily David
Kevin Killian @ Third Factory's Attention Span
Susana Gardner @ Attention Span 2010
Susan Smith Nash @ Press 1
David Peak @ The Rumpus
“An occultation is a withdrawing, a flight or sentence into non-
existence. In David Wolach's OCCULTATIONS, the reader becomes
propinquitous to so much that she can't see, so withdrawn has the
actual world become through a media which functions as the eyes and
ears to the detriment of a becoming proprioceptive. By amplifying the
senseless via pun and other synaesthesic language effects, Wolach
overturns common sense and returns his reader to their senses. What
would be contemporary peeks out through Wolach's picnolepsy. Element (principally fire) is not merely a theme but a burden—‘the fires have not died / they've moved away with the j o b s’—the ethical burden of whatever remains in the movement between site and nonsite, I and we, direct address and a corrosive intertextual poetics in the service of secular messianic event. ‘dear, __________’ ‘who will take me from
our ashen / refuge?’ Reading OCCULTATIONS, ‘I’ takes refuge in loss, lack, and non-presence saved only by what cannot be redeemed: the
wreck of our bodies shored by the catastrophic convergence of late
capitalist Neoliberalism and cross-cultural moral fundamentalisms.”
—Thom Donovan