Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Human Resources
    Human Resources
    Human Resources
    Ebook86 pages28 minutes

    Human Resources

    By Rachel Zolf

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

    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 themachine 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.

    ‘In this bad-mouthing and incandescent burlesque, Rachel Zolf transforms a necessary social anger into the pure fuel that takes us to “the beautiful excess of the unshackled referent. * We learn something new about guts, and about how dictions slip across one another, entwining, shimmering, wisecracking. For Zolf,political invention takes precedent, works the search engine.’ – Lisa Robertson

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoach House Books
    Release dateMar 23, 2007
    ISBN9781770561052
    Human Resources
    Author

    Rachel Zolf

    Rachel Zolf’s writing practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her books of poetry include Neighbour Procedure (2010); Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award; Masque (2004), finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; and Her absence, this wanderer (1999). Among her many collaborations with other artists, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women's Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami 2012. She has taught at New York’s The New School University and the University of Calgary.

    Read more from Rachel Zolf

    Related to Human Resources

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Rot

      Sep 2, 2022

      Rot
      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Jennifer Barber

      Jun 8, 2021

      At first puzzlement, then joy. My baby in the making—surely my last—would, like a ferry heading for a wharf,know what to do along the way. The multiplying cells, the chemistryof contentment spreading through my blood: I was as ready for her birthas I

      1 min read

    • Article

      Loquats

      Dec 7, 2021

      In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads. I collect their remains: piebald, sweetand sour. A syrup made of loquats is said to cure cough. Their woolly twigssplinter in pear blight. I am bereft when

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Chinese Word for Sorry

      Mar 1, 2022

      My mother holds her apology in one hand, bowl of cut fruit bursting from her palm as if she were the tree whose branches bore blood rush apples, bruise purple pears, unholy screams of persimmons torn from sun, instead of a daughter without accent onl

      1 min read

    • Article

      Love Is Not a Destination: The Millions Interviews Kaveh Akbar

      Jul 21, 2021

      Without some physiological sublimation of the inert font into a living poem—whether via breath or the movement of ocular muscles along a line, fingers across Braille—the poem remains ink on a page. If a poem augurs any holiness, it begins in the body

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Rails

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Rails
      1 min read

    • Article

      José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

      Nov 21, 2023

      American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso. The post José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Decision [de-, Caedere-, Latin]

      Mar 1, 2024

      Life is a series of decisions to move this poster to another room; that ass to some other chair.There isn’t really much to it, and then we’re done for. There was a time I wrote, seriously, about grief. I wonder whyI can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Retiring

      Sep 1, 2021

      Elk bones everywhere myfather texts, from a gulchoutside Eagle, Colorado.At seventy, he’s begun to hunt more decisive danger: the riftunjumpable, the trail belowa cocked boulder, orcopperheads fizzing in slim fissures. No more meat, he insists.Turn

      1 min read

    • Article

      Follow Them

      Nov 1, 2021

      Heartbroken over a football game, Autumnevening, of this kind of thing I’m not ashamednor of the twistiness of that diction,or wanting America to burnthough only certain parts deserve it,its forests are beautiful and have donenothing wrong, even the

      1 min read

    • Article

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

      Oct 15, 2019

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
      1 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      It is all, allover the earth, underearth, a graveyard: tree ferns, trees—roots,bark, seeds—ancientlife that emerged from the sea, forestsflooded to swamps& bogs, transformed to peat, transformedagain, sunk, coveredwith layers of earth with strangeamp

      2 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems by Eavan Boland

      May 1, 2020

      Four Poems by Eavan Boland
      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      Interregnum

      Dec 7, 2021

      I know that feeling you have: wanting the world,at last, to yield something, the way liquor does—an angle, an idea, a color, a deepening. Know that you are a creature who waits and doesnot act. Forget that you are waiting for a minute;chew the last o

      1 min read

    • Article

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2023

      At the end of the world, I sat in the dark waiting for you,but you didn’t come. You didn’t save me. At the end we are always alone, candles slowlyburning out, losing the flame for lack of oxygen. You didn’t tell me it would be like this. All of itcam

      2 min read

    • Article

      Some Of The Men We Love Are Terrorists

      Jan 1, 2022

      & honestly, i have no solutions—our world a mad swarm of bees. forgive me my own devotion, the handsome clench. my first love masters a sinister arithmetic; his patrilineage swelling like a heavy god between his legs. i’m well-conditioned, my hands a

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

      3 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: November 2020

      Nov 5, 2020

      Stop obsessively refreshing the New York Times's elections page, and check out these new books of poetry by Alice Quinn, Margaret Atwood, Yi Lei, Karina Borowicz, Valzhyna Mort, and Paul Celan. The post Must-Read Poetry: November 2020 appeared first

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      There was a family of deer that looked something like us.They traveled far with a fierce sense of collective unity.Held their fearless faces absent of cosmic worry, for the most part.And yet something crept in, making the easiest partof being togethe

      9 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Quarantine Morning

      Dec 7, 2021

      Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palmsand soles, bent far forward, I seemy shins closer than usual—their indigo and red-violet fireworks,their royal-blue wormholes—how much difference is there, anymore,between me and a cadaver?I know I won’t come,

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Human Resources

    3.5/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Human Resources - Rachel Zolf

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1