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Fugue and Strike

Joe Hall

$29.99

Paperback

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English
Black Ocean
11 July 2023
These are poems that rock you like a tilt-a-whirl, off-kilter and non-stop.

In this collection of poems by Joe Hall, you might find yourself laid off at a cannabis grow or vomiting gold. You might find yourself screaming in your underwear at the tech bro in the derelict arcade in your head. You might find your despair here or a gentle sign of change. Many of the poems here unearth histories in which people refuse the systems that designate them waste or wastable in hyper-compacted blocks of poetry and prose. Defiant, funny, and gentle, this book braids the panic-inducing catastrophes of now with a long view of solidarity in struggle.
By:  
Imprint:   Black Ocean
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 177mm,  Width: 107mm, 
ISBN:   9781939568670
ISBN 10:   1939568676
Pages:   125
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

A poet, critic, and junk bookmaker, Joe Hall Blog, and an NFTA bus shelter. He lives in Buffalo, NY.

Reviews for Fugue and Strike

"“Joe Hall's Fugue and Strike combines deep, involved observation of the ongoing now (in all its crisis-inflected forms) with an exploration of past refusals of the process of becoming waste. In the thick of an endless fight for liveable life, Hall presents parallel wastages—both the people made into waste by state and socioeconomic violence, and the excess objects, fragments, sites, and molecules generated by the same violence. The fugue of navigating a breathlessly gentrified, financialized city space leads to a time-hopping study of garbage handlers' strikes. These poems recognize what happens when we ‘try to say 'No'’ but ‘on Monday the manager confiscated [our]'N,' on Friday [our] 'O'.’ Word fails, action arises, and somehow, along with it, hope. Any reader sharing this fugue/strike might say, ‘I felt the tip of something I could not see in me that trembles,’ and know that it is not just fear.” —Jay Besemer “Joe Hall vomits gold. In Fugue & Strike, poetry hovers spectrally above the infrastructures of the capitalist machine, laying bare its circuitry and potential oblivion: tech bros and muscular Ivy League dads are robbed. A missive smeared in excrement becomes a manifesto. Mutiny is declared against poetic form. Cops and scabs murder each other. In its close examination of the void between labor and commodity, pleasure and oblivion, Hall’s terrifying and often hilarious book envisions ‘a space of public salvage,’ a global common that stretches from Buffalo to Ithaca, to the world. These poems will make you want to strike, fight back, and leave a burning bag of shit on your boss’s doorstep—and for that, we need them. Joe Hall is one of the greatest poets we have.” —Marty Cain ""Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.""—The Boston Globe"


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