I always think that the only poem by Niedecker that I have memorized is “I married.” But, it’s not memorized—every time I get to the part about which body part…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
Hannah Brooks-Motl
I have been immensely influenced. And yet, this way of writing, the floaty suspended action of a phrase or word, took me a long time to arrive at. I’ve been…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
Introducing “The Marsh”
In the course of editing the essays for “Locating Lorine Niedecker,” Sarah and I felt we were presented with a fabulous opportunity. Only rarely does one assemble the collective talents…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
In Search of Anti-Work Time: Mapping the Anti-Serial Impulse
In 1976, Carol Lopate wrote a remarkable essay about daytime television and the daily rhythms of housework. “The noise of the game shows’ shrieks and laughter injects the home with…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
Working Hard or Hardly Working? Gig-Work and the Gimmick in The Beautiful Bureaucrat
“Has evolution really managed to culminate in this? This spoon, this cup, this plate; us, here.”1 Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat documents the brief period during which its protagonist, Josephine…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
Shadows of the Occupation: Wendy Trevino’s “Sonnets for Brass Knuckles Doodles” and Nonprofit Epistemology
“The same ‘reason’ I thought I could help change the world is the ‘reason’ I thought the sonnet form would lead to a ‘conclusion.'” — Bernadette Mayer, author’s note to…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
“Unsevered is Not a Word”: Anti-work Beyond the Office in Severance
Severance is one of the most uncompromising anti-work shows to appear on TV, turning office comedy cringe to explicit horror. A nightmare masked as fantasy, Severance asks: what if we…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
False Premises: Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State
Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State — a memoir so unreliable that it appears dishonest, so thieving it has been clubbed into a series of “backdoor memoirs” — traffics in the oily,…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
Introduction: Anti-Work Aesthetics
There’s nothing new about the hatred of work. So long as there has been work, work has always been hell, and workers have always known it. Working conditions transform, innovating…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading with Algorithms
Breakfast with AlgoBooks: Meet the Future of Reader Recommendation
The naughty algorithm, the chaotic algorithm, the baby algorithm who is still learning, the “dumb,” unnuanced algorithm. All these are “algorithm adjectives,” real terms we have observed in use at…