Human Resources

by Syd Zolf

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.

Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste – and the creative potential of salvage.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2003

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can confidently say I read every single word--my eyes passed over every single word. I strongly considered stopping, but what if I miss a poem that is transcendent? That . . . didn't necessarily pan out for me.

This book makes me feel a little like that time my ex-boyfriend and his friends sent GIANT images of dinosaurs to all of my friends, crashing their inboxes, in the early oughts. Like, I get it. I get the joke. It just isn't a joke for ME.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cultural heavies from Socrates to the Harvard Business Review join a rush of impersonal voices that comment, Greek tragic-like, on the violence just under the codes we use to keep modernity moving. A profound exploration of how euphemism, bureaucratic argot, and numbers in certain combinations enabled the twentieth century. Zolf's hope, finally, is with encryption; the possibility of being, through poetry, the thing the machines can't read.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literally wallowing in the dredges of our language, this book utilizes Markov chain to explore the 86,800 most used English words, along with the language and pedagogy of business writing to great effect.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

i kind of feel like I am at work reading this. I'm definitely going to quit my job.

[Joel Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

diminishing proceduralist returns