Syd Zolf – författare

In No One's Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan-“No one / bears witness for the / witness”-to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

In No One's Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan-“No one / bears witness for the / witness”-to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

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. Q: ‘Do you expei'ience any dread of the Indigns?’ A: 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

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.