Additional information
Weight | .75 lbs |
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Dimensions | 7 × .4 × 9.9 in |
Hotel abc is poetry fieldwork done in the trenches of daily life
$17.95
Weight | .75 lbs |
---|---|
Dimensions | 7 × .4 × 9.9 in |
The poems in Hotel abc function as ethnographic notes, exposing the fact that we are all under the thumb of circadian rhythm, struggling to negotiate our shared condition. Reporters and hotel guests leave and enter the book, revealing that the face of the beloved is also an icon, that some sounds can only be heard in certain places and that the origins of language are impossible to locate.
There’s the (il)logic of a kind of auditory-oral synaesthesia at work in these poems (or is it coexistence, as in: communion, community?), wherein attention is a kind of speaking – or wherein address acknowledges attention as its prerequisite. I can’t stop thinking that these poems are also hymns: hymns that resist the respectable spectrums of devotion and its objects, that envelop the irreverent. Hymns that are also diagnoses of our incomplete and mundane and dangerous-to-each-other bodies, expressions of sensory and extrasensory pieties from this/our inescapable circadianity. Because while “belief is hard to summon” when the backdrops of writing are invasion, these poems make repetition a mode of devotion, even as they resist making repetition a form of devotion. “I do not venerate I do not adorate / I repeat,” Gevirtz writes. And so this book enacts “the exquisite problem of repetition”: that one must (re)traverse the crises, the vulnerabilities, rehearse and rehash the “having had enough” to arrive at that crucial commentary, which is itself a kind of fidelity.”