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Janey's Arcadia
Rachel Zolf’s fifth book assembles a pirate score of error-ridden historical and current documents – missionary narratives, immigration pamphlets, settler writings – to decry the ongoing violence of Canadian colonialism. It stars Janey Settler-Invader, a foul-mouthed mutant slouching toward the Red River Colony, along with a host of cacophonous, carnivalesque appropriations.
Praise for Janey's Arcadia :
'That poetry can be forcefully consequential is not a safe assumption in our contemporary crisis of sustainable attention. To deploy an intricately political poetics as Zolf’s performative texts do is a wager on expansion of the genre with no small risk of misreadings. The driving courage of Janey’s Arcadia is in fact its digital-age enactment of an allegory of misreading. Subjecting Canadian settler texts (in which indigenous peoples’ humanity can be casually or fervently dismissed) to Optical Character Recognition software, a chilling and ludicrous display of misreadings occur, inescapably charged by the cultural politics of non-recognition. A reader’s encounters range from the philosophically profound “Each person is an asking…” to the OCR mutated government questionnaire. ‘Do you expei'ience any dread of the Indigns?’ I have no fear of Indigns, for I never see one.'
– Joan Retallack
'Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.'
– CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE
'I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba....”'
– Kevin Killian
Praise for Janey's Arcadia :
'That poetry can be forcefully consequential is not a safe assumption in our contemporary crisis of sustainable attention. To deploy an intricately political poetics as Zolf’s performative texts do is a wager on expansion of the genre with no small risk of misreadings. The driving courage of Janey’s Arcadia is in fact its digital-age enactment of an allegory of misreading. Subjecting Canadian settler texts (in which indigenous peoples’ humanity can be casually or fervently dismissed) to Optical Character Recognition software, a chilling and ludicrous display of misreadings occur, inescapably charged by the cultural politics of non-recognition. A reader’s encounters range from the philosophically profound “Each person is an asking…” to the OCR mutated government questionnaire. ‘Do you expei'ience any dread of the Indigns?’ I have no fear of Indigns, for I never see one.'
– Joan Retallack
'Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.'
– CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE
'I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba....”'
– Kevin Killian
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
First published August 18, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 14, 2015
Too clever.
February 23, 2017
I wasn't really sure what I'd rate this poe(m/try)+h(auntolog/histor-y). But so many things clicked at a certain point.
If the book's back blurb note about being "a pirate score of glitch-ridden settler narratives" is scary to you, keep in mind the text itself is super tame, and essentially nothing-ridden; there are much more difficult reads, and if you go slow and are mindful the heavy 'glitches,' missing text (just in the 4 or 5 pages of text printed slightly larger than the paper itself), and the generally obscure all seems to reveal itself—if you were ever a shithead teenager writing in l33t or if you've ever encountered any typographical play at all before, you will be fine to read this book.
So when you check this book out (it's a headache, but not impossible, no multi-page footnotes like DFW or anything), I suggest you start with "WHAT SAID AUTHOR SAYS OF THE CANADIAN NORTH-WASP [SIC]," which outlines the idiosyncratic rules and references, demystifying a bit of the conceptual work going on but ultimately making the read much easier and clearer.
The book is speaking a little bit out of turn sometimes, and definitely in a way that distracts from what it refers to as "?THE INDIGN QUESTION," but it seems to acknowledge these shortcomings at the end.
Collection as a whole would do better if it were sliced down some, but as a bit of a maximalist Bastard myself, I can't outright criticize brickwalled text and 'the too-much' (aka NOISE, aka what would have convinced me of Shannon Mcguires' 'Myrmurs'' noisey potency (but sadly was lacking, and shouldn't have cited the 'buzzwordiness' of if it didn't want to draw attention to its conspicuous lack thereof)).
Geeze, I gotta stop it with the parenthesis.
I'll leave you with a messy glimpse at something resembling a quote, and then if you feel like giving yourself a headache over something sort of neat looking and alien feeling, give the book a lookeesee yrself.
//
S(Jn of the Great Spri / who •f^vjir 'WHO IS THIS JESUS 67 died to sale us *
//
Ps,
I bought this book with no frame of reference just because I'm from the prairies and I like the slippery inside out utopian notions of Arcadia and my mother's chosen name is Jane and that was my only impetus and I'm pleased enough that it turned out well.
If the book's back blurb note about being "a pirate score of glitch-ridden settler narratives" is scary to you, keep in mind the text itself is super tame, and essentially nothing-ridden; there are much more difficult reads, and if you go slow and are mindful the heavy 'glitches,' missing text (just in the 4 or 5 pages of text printed slightly larger than the paper itself), and the generally obscure all seems to reveal itself—if you were ever a shithead teenager writing in l33t or if you've ever encountered any typographical play at all before, you will be fine to read this book.
So when you check this book out (it's a headache, but not impossible, no multi-page footnotes like DFW or anything), I suggest you start with "WHAT SAID AUTHOR SAYS OF THE CANADIAN NORTH-WASP [SIC]," which outlines the idiosyncratic rules and references, demystifying a bit of the conceptual work going on but ultimately making the read much easier and clearer.
The book is speaking a little bit out of turn sometimes, and definitely in a way that distracts from what it refers to as "?THE INDIGN QUESTION," but it seems to acknowledge these shortcomings at the end.
Collection as a whole would do better if it were sliced down some, but as a bit of a maximalist Bastard myself, I can't outright criticize brickwalled text and 'the too-much' (aka NOISE, aka what would have convinced me of Shannon Mcguires' 'Myrmurs'' noisey potency (but sadly was lacking, and shouldn't have cited the 'buzzwordiness' of if it didn't want to draw attention to its conspicuous lack thereof)).
Geeze, I gotta stop it with the parenthesis.
I'll leave you with a messy glimpse at something resembling a quote, and then if you feel like giving yourself a headache over something sort of neat looking and alien feeling, give the book a lookeesee yrself.
//
S(Jn of the Great Spri / who •f^vjir 'WHO IS THIS JESUS 67 died to sale us *
//
Ps,
I bought this book with no frame of reference just because I'm from the prairies and I like the slippery inside out utopian notions of Arcadia and my mother's chosen name is Jane and that was my only impetus and I'm pleased enough that it turned out well.
April 16, 2016
Strong, inventive, fringe-marginative, retrieves the figure of the Erased Indign from the ground of paper White Paper settlement, also playful, the interstitiality in the lacuna of belonging, reveals as much as conceals its concealment as its revelation, the Whoisthisjesus-inchoate-echoation-Cree-ation reverservation annihilation by genecease, that tiresome invasion — still — unceasing, if decayed nor obsolesced, obtrudes therearenoindignshere. Yet there are Indigns here, some assimilated, some on the edges of inassimilation, some murdered in the Red, some disappeared in the Assiniboine.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews