Occultations

by David Wolach

Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the "courage of paradoxical evocation." For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that "the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the 'surveillance-industrial complex' but also to the limitations of language's ability to fully articulate 'what work this dying is.'" In (un)mapping its state of accelerated becoming, this (collective) body asks whether it can, through radical re-narration of its (re)constitution by neo-liberal capitalism and militarism, allegorize the wider catastrophic affects these logic-systems have on an ecosystem. "Is it possible," asks Laura Elrick, "to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d?" As place, the occulted recursively struggles to perform exploratory surgery on normative valuations of its capacities, on what is taken to be possible and what is not.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2010

About the author

Professor of Text Arts, Poetry & Poetics, Aesthetics and New Media, The Evergreen State College. Visiting Professor, Workshop In Language & Thinking, Bard College. Editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press.

Union organizer and AFL-CIO consultant, UAW 2000-2007.

Books forthcoming:

--Acts of Art/Works of Violence (SSLA/USydney, 2010)
--Hospitalogy (chapbook, Scantily Clad Press, 2010)
--The Cutting Room (chapbook, Differentia Press, 2010)

Books:

--Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010)
--Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox Books, 2010)
--book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009)
--Fractions of M (chapbook, Trainwreck Press, 2008)

Books Recently Edited:

--PRESS: Activism & the Avant-Garde (Wheelhouse Press, 2009)
--Consensualism In Principle, Raul Kumar (Blackwell, 2008)

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

...do it!...
...buy and read this book!...
...you'll enter into scenarios in which you read about and participate in the re-narration of sites of experience and inquiry...where you, as a reader! become intertwined in relations with the narrator/author in multiple geographies and thus become phenomenological with each other!!!...it is texts like Occultations that show us that our literature situates itself most ethically in our relationship to each other and to our bodies...bodies...

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work of embodied & enminded queercrip poetics. There is nothing else like OCCULTATIONS, and the work is worth reading for the brief essay in the back alone. This is a really remarkable work of intertextual and political thought that leans into the staggering task of embodiment, to refuse a curative or sanitizing creative practice and push instead toward the illegible and [ill]egible.