Rachel Zolf
Biography
Rachel Zolf's third book of poetry, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in 2007. Her second book, Masque (The Mercury Press, 2004), was shortlisted for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She lives in Toronto and is the poetry editor for The Walrus magazine.
Poet's Note on Human Resources
Human Resources makes a vain attempt to answer Anne Carson's question around Paul Celan's poetry: "What is lost when words are wasted and where is the human store to which such goods are gathered in?" The subject of the book, a poet, wastes words writing "plain language" marketing and employee communications for pay, turning into a kind of writing (or rhetoric) machine in the process. As the two worlds of poetry and plain language collide, overlap and merge in the book, we enter a nonsense state of fractured subjectivity, experiencing the psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Psychoanalytic, general-economic and transmission-theory rhetorics fed into the writing machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, art production and communication. In the end, the new-look body without organs organizing the text is semi-recuperated through ethical confrontations with the multiple voices within and without her, while her book-machine frame crumbles before it can really form.
Sample Poem
from Human Resources (pdf)
External Links
Test Recording
29 March 2006
Jay MillAr (43:32, 41.8 MB, info.)
Rachel Zolf (36:58, 35.5 MB, info.)
Question and answer session (20:06, 19.3 MB, info.)
Photographs by Sharon Harris