Terror Matrix

by Zoe Tuck

Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Politics. Occult. With spells by Z. Ozma. "For all its gnostic scholarship, the writing of Zoe Tuck always sounds absolutely contemporary. In TERROR MATRIX, we witness drones tracking the smell of cooking onions, Amazon putting its books to death, the queer body dragged to a xenophobic Liam Neeson vehicle, and everywhere, everywhere, witches on the torture rack again. It couldn't be more 2014. Zoe's privileged form is the interruption, the break within the break, another glaring condition of the now. 'This bare life's made possible by constant rupture.' Not wonderful, not horrible, just possible. Zoe has a crystalline sense of rupture as hope, as eventful change, as the fractures in the boundaries of identity, but at the same time understands it as a most useful tool for state terror, as the violent partitioning of bodies, as the multi-media cloud cutting into and across itself in order to splinter resistance and distract from its own amorality. All who share a sense of rupture's ambiguity will treasure this 'safe poetic exercise in S&M.'"--Brent Cunningham

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

Unknown Binding

First published May 9, 2014

About the author

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her work explores queer and trans life, and the spirituality of reading. She is the author of Bedroom Vowel (BUNNY Presse, 2023) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014), as well as the chapbooks The Book of Bella (Doublecross Press), bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel's Peach Woman, and Vape Cloud of Unknowing (Belladonna* Collaborative). A member of Belladonna* Collaborative, she also co-edits Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Bark Brown. She teaches creative writing and literature classes through Threshold Academy and elsewhere.

Reviews

[alfo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was a conscious exertion throughout.It was sporadic and wrung like a memory.

[Deyana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, meditative, subversive, honest, vulnerable, strong. The words weave and toss and turn, and as soon as you get comfortable: rupture. I haven't read anything like this before, poetry and prose side by side intertwined one in another; or rather not--rather overlapped, covering one another, seemingly suffocating, but really, it's a breath of fresh air:

"i'll meet you when the moon grows tall" (22).

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has me always thinking about "lessons in unworlding." it makes things better

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Small, smart.