A meditation on sites of public memory, Jill Magi's SLOT powerfully critiques the commercialization of such sites. Must our grief be turned into manipulated spectacle? This long poem pushes against the grain and suggests alternative routes. Never didactic, it balances the desire for collective mourning with the need for private ruminations. Partial lyric views interweave with the writings of others, present only as citations in a rigorous and wide-ranging bibliography. SLOT is 'an invitation to study.' Take it up; it is work worth doing.

Jena Osman

SLOT pulls us through a beautiful yet harrowing poetic journey through the sediment of memory that has come to be called 9/11. By confronting the shock and desperation of violence on that achingly gorgeous autumn day, Jill Magi finds the words and images to allow us to re-member fragments of emotion and national identity that the act of memorializing has made us forget.

Robin Kelley

In SLOT, Jill Magi's committed mis-hearing opens a place in personal language and public feeling for a necessarily secular memory. Why? The state naturalizes its myths and subjugations by suturing memory to identity; the result is the governable subject. Against all such planned diminishments, SLOT attends the immaterial voice as it emerges from bodies, buildings, documents, and other things that leak. This deeply historical writing erodes sutures and aggressions to compose a 'street level belief' that's supple, pulsing, pitched for the complex present.

Lisa Robertson

Despite the wide-ranging thoughtful investigation of this collection, it is hard to ignore the bit of irony that exists in the fact that Magi’s desire to refuse 'slotting' events and grief results in a perfect-bound book, a container of these thoughts and questions that can easily be closed and put away in an open slot on a bookcase. Nonetheless, this is an important collection that is wise in its inquiry and wise in its refusal to reach resolution.

Gina Myers

...what a complex achievement: the feeling of the individual as she encounters public versions of history, the continual moments in which private memory encounters public memory—encounters and resists, questions, is subject to, is only one self in the face of larger (even grand, or grandiose) historical narratives and the real loss of the past.

Hilary Plum

Her fourth full collection, Slot addresses “landscaped memory” through Magi’s characteristic hybrid of image, poetry, and samplings of texts from a broad bibliography. Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and memory, interrogating the urge to abstract, label, and catalogue suffering.

Lisa Wells, the Rumpus

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ISBN: 978-1-933254-87-6
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 136 pp, Publication Date: October 25 2011
Distribution: SPD
Series: Dossier