Agony

by Steven Zultanski

Agony is the first in a trilogy of long confessional poems. It uses semi-rigorous mathematical and logical constraints to view the author's life and body, telescopically, as little bits of time and space. Everything written here is as true as possible – that is to say, pretty true. It attempts autobiography as a refutation of autobiography, and an elevation of the self as self-effacement. Love pops up as a theme quite a bit. So does self-mutilation, etc. There are a lot of numbers, but don't worry, it's more about politics and fantasy than numbers, even though, as usual, they show up everywhere. Just like pieces of your body after you've cut them off and scattered them all over the world, and then go out looking for them again, for some reason.

Genres: Poetry

158 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 21, 2012

Reviews

[Michal Tallo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sometimes I'm about to push someone else's lover in the pool and instead I jump in myself, because what I really want is to be submerged, and the only reason I was going to push someone else in the first place was because I imagined I would better fulfill my wanting by forcing someone else to want the same thing, which, either way, results in my own submersion, finally; and then I press the whole length of my body against the bottom of the pool, and hold myself there as long as I can, which isn't very long."

[Claudia Wilde · Rating 3 out of 5]

"For example, given that a body is a limit, insofar as it marks a separation between it and what it’s not, the meat of the body, even when piled into a relatively homogenous mass of pink stuff, and even when divorced from whichever consciousness appeared to give it originality (mine, in this case), is ideally suited only for construction of such visible limits, as opposed to what is perfect — that is, the perfect copy, insofar as it doubles said limits, necessarily abolishes them."

[Joel Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fidget (the interesting version)

[Patty Gone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zultanski writes in clear mathematical prose, presenting a a mundane thing in the world (crying a single tear, pushing one's nostrils up against glass, sitting in one's childhood room, and building a mountain of hypotheticals around it. Many of these sections function as mathematical proofs, and Zultanski does a fair share of calculation, but weirding the units with which something is measured (how many breasts tall is the Empire State Building?) or measuring things that one would never 'need' to measure (how many faces would it take to fill up each window of each house on the average suburban block, & how much would it cost to pay a workforce to stand in those windows for their entire lifetimes?). It's a pleasurable drift and performs a detournement of everyday actions. It many ways these calculations undermine sentimentality (what if I screamed at a lover continuously for a year?) but in these hypotheticals comes an awareness to quantity, a way to quantify human emotion. Even when calculated and sterilized, emotion can't help but be emotional.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be read in companionship with Daniel Borzutsky's Data Bodies and Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

(I have complaints with Zultanski's use of women's breasts as an alternative metric for measurements: buildings being x breasts tall, etc. I understand that it is one of many alt metrics relating to the body--such as the volume of a single tear--however there's a too familiar violence in the fetishization of a decontextualized object of sexual desire. What affordance does this alt metric bring that wouldn't be better illustrated by the average length of a flaccid penis? Much of this book is built around heartbreak, and although it's alright for him to indulge his respective fantasies around the lost woman, but I wish he would stop short of disemboweling her/me/us.)

On cutting his fingers off: "'Getting creative,' in the usual sense, has to do entirely with becoming a more resourceful employee. And my fantasy of slicing myself up involves instead the excessively literal subtraction of my body from the job market."

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

So seas cannot be shattered, and worlds can. That which is not shatterable, thus, is not a world. A world is defined by its shatterability. Some planets, then, could never be worlds. The gas giants - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - will not shatter no matter how many Taipei 101s are dropped on them; gas is durable as water.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boobs.