Human Resources / Edition 1

by Syd Zolf

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552451823
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	04/14/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (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.