Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Writing from what Frank Sherlock calls a "genderqueer nomadism," david wolach's HOSPITALOGY traces living forms of intimate and militant listening within the Hospital Industrial Complex—hospitals, medical clinics and neighboring motels. The book of poems and short essay performs a sociopoetic surgery that is exploratory, not curative, on the institutional sites of contestation that wolach is writing (and reading) from within. But HOSPITALOGY is not performing diagnostic work; it is singing back the sounds of places upon a body, faint as they often are at the edges of the "dark hospital precipice."
"david wolach's HOSPITALOGY is an extraordinary work that takes us into the complex guts of the 'hospital-hotel complex.' Here the body rebels, redacts, pulls, and sings between patient and patient. wolach performs a radical somatics, procedural anatomic work, queer narrativity—where 'the written is explored as catastrophe and its aftermath.' ... It's no coincidence that one (early) definition of 'hospital' is to denote a place for the 'reception and entertainment of travelers and strangers' because HOSPITALOGY reminds readers that even when 'visibly and markedly indecipherable,' with an active and activist I/eye, collaboration and conversation can reclaim any space. I am thankful for this book."—Erica Kaufman
"Dear 'groundwater,' Dear 'jesus of the pain.' Welcome to david wolach's beautiful corrosion, HOSPITALOGY."—Fred Moten
"At a time when hospitality is increasingly deployed to sterilize policies of deportation and incarceration (witness Bush's 'guest workers' and the Greek state's 'Operation Xenios Zeus'), david wolach performs the common detention of patients, workers, and other undesirables in 'places of liquidation.' .. HOSPITALOGY asks how holding spaces become healing spaces, not despite but because of their toxicity. This book holds the space of the clinic we don't yet have, the dark we need, the chronic we might dream rather than undergo."—Eleni Stecopoulos
"david wolach's HOSPITALOGY is a place of genderqueer nomadism within the rubric of the Hospital Industrial Complex.... The 'corporate body modification of mortality' is the problem, each patient an ecosystem vulnerable to disaster. The weakened antibodies of the individual, the poisoned Gulf of Mexico, the torn New Orleans, and the deforested Haiti are interconnected by abuses of sustainable balance. This is a book that documents the soft rebellion of staying alive, articulating the transition from invisibility to indecipherability."—Frank Sherlock
Author Bio
david wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and has been an active participant in Nonsite Collective. wolach is the author of HOSPITALOGY (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), OCCULTATIONS (Black Radish Books, 2010), Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVOX [books], 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009).
Author City: Olympia, WA USA