Poetry. Rachel Zolf's powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning HUMAN RESOURCES is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media, and public texts, NEIGHBOUR PROCEDURE sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbors, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman, and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humor and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics.
Author Hometown: NEW YORK, NY USA
About the author: Rachel Zolf is a poet and editor from Toronto who is presently living in New York. Her third full-length book, HUMAN RESOURCES, won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Award. Previous collections include Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books), MASQUE (The Mercury Press) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). She was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and has edited several books of poetry. NEIGHBOUR PROCEDURE (Coach House Books, 2010) is her most recent book.
Reviews:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/zolf/index.html
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Zolf.php
http://whof.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-of-rachel-zolfs-neighbour.html
Erin Wunker in The Mark
“This is an extraordinary collection of poems, and yet I hesitate in saying this, since something happens to poetry in these pages, so I no longer know what precisely poetry is or can be. In fact, Rachel Zolf brings an incredible range of readings to bear on the poetic line. If there is a mixing of media within these lines, there is also a proliferation of tongues, an effort to let language collide to produce a more acute and anguished experience of war. Israel and Palestine recur in the fits and starts of meditation offered here where language follows unpredictable sequences and finds itself suddenly stuttering in its vowels. There is mourning, rage and some brave and difficult effort to speak across traditions, languages, to avow loss, to expose the colder rationalities of occupation and war, and a linguistic fathoming of the ethics of proximity. This is courageous and moving work that feels like the struggle of a lifetime condensed into potent lines.”
—Judith Butler
“NEIGHBOUR PROCEDURE is the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I’ve read to date; Zolf’s language-motion escapes several nation-states’ culture capture zones while re-threading the very notion of ‘self’-representational purposivity.”
—Rodrigo Toscano
“This book is a sharp, painful cry against the tyranny of the monologic.”
—Charles Bernstein