LABOR

Magi makes us look at labor in a way we might have never before. Like a hybrid tapestry, she weaves a narrative, a beautiful, complex nonlinear one with different types of writing to explore labor inside out… Magi is adept at showing the multilayered affects of how archiving, while showing us hidden information we need to know, can do a disservice to real actualities of “labor” and “protests” and “work.” Yet without the archive, maybe we wouldn’t have had this book. It’s a complicated mix, and Magi is acutely aware of it and working with this double entendre to the max.

The book defies poetic and economic genre, such that everything is writing and writing is work and work could play out “as pleasure / as social self.” Magi’s formula proffers transcendence—the kind you might get riding the elevator to the top of a large library, your gut unable to keep up with your idea, your idea leaping off the roof, flittering archival papers everywhere and with everyone.