Neighbour Procedure

by Syd Zolf

Overview

Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media and public texts, Neighbour Procedure sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humour and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552452295
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	02/22/2010
Edition description:	1
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Syd (formerly Rachel) Zolf has published six books of poetry, including three with Coach House Books: Janey’s Arcadia (2014), Neighbour Procedure (2010), and Human Resources (2007); and a selected poetry, Social Poesis, with Wilfrid Laurier UniversityPress (2019). Their theoretical text, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke UP, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, presented by the Poetry Foundation. Honors also include a 2018 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and finalist for several other prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards. They teach at the University of Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

'Neighbour Procedure … pack[s] an intellectual punch that reminds us, once again, of the powerhouse generations of innovative feminist poets that continually challenge and transform our understanding of what poetic texts can do.' – Matrix Magazine

'Rachel Zolf brings an incredible range of readings to bear on the poetic line. If there is a mixing of media within these lines, there is also a proliferation of tongues, an effort to let language collide to produce a more acute and anguished experience of war … This is a courageous and moving work that feels like the struggle of a lifetime condensed into potent lines.’ – Judith Butler, critical theorist and author of Gender Trouble

‘Politics and poetry are a volatile mix. Yes, except that the voices of war and terrorism are themselves defiantly both. Zolf shows us this truth, and so her lyrics s(t)ing, acidly.’ – George Elliott Clarke, author of George and Rue

‘This book is a sharp, painful cry against the tyranny of the monologic.’ – Charles Bernstein, author of Girly Man and Attack of the Difficult Poems

‘Neighbour Procedure is the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I've read to date; Zolf's language-motion escapes several nation-states' culture capture zones while re-threading the very notion of "self"-representational purposivity.’ – Rodrigo Toscano, author of Collapsible Poetics Theatre

'Neighbour Procedure … pack[s] an intellectual punch that reminds us, once again, of the powerhouse generations of innovative feminist poets that continually challenge and transform our understanding of what poetic texts can do.' – Matrix Magazine

'Rachel Zolf brings an incredible range of readings to bear on the poetic line. If there is a mixing of media within these lines, there is also a proliferation of tongues, an effort to let language collide to produce a more acute and anguished experience of war … This is a courageous and moving work that feels like the struggle of a lifetime condensed into potent lines.’ – Judith Butler, critical theorist and author of Gender Trouble

‘Politics and poetry are a volatile mix. Yes, except that the voices of war and terrorism are themselves defiantly both. Zolf shows us this truth, and so her lyrics s(t)ing, acidly.’ – George Elliott Clarke, author of George and Rue

‘This book is a sharp, painful cry against the tyranny of the monologic.’ – Charles Bernstein, author of Girly Man and Attack of the Difficult Poems

‘Neighbour Procedure is the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I've read to date; Zolf's language-motion escapes several nation-states' culture capture zones while re-threading the very notion of "self"-representational purposivity.’ – Rodrigo Toscano, author of Collapsible Poetics Theatre

From the Publisher