Given a kind of realism also
serving beyond its borders,
a campy stress to posit pre-
connoitered iterations of
solvency’s onsite availability,
vacuous, prolix, benign or be-
nighted future congress w/
fungal uprising’s dehystericized
masterclass, I became
the change I couldn’t spare
the sight to see.
Insolvency, Insolvency!
Jeremy Hoevenaar
November 2017
These are multisyllabic bars of actuarial nerdrap
Eugene Lim
Insolvency, Insolvency!: A cluster of word-based ailments presenting as a progression of tonally anxious lyric schizo-orations kept buzzingly aloft by well-nurtured and good-natured incurrences of deep financial, social, and cultural debt. The poems—textual and textural avatars of a continuously renegotiated present occupied with and by living, working, and making—deepen the debt via liberal borrowing from sources literary and beyond; but the hope might be that they also repay (with irony as interest) some of what’s owed, if entering repayment can be considered a kind of prosody.
About the Author
Jeremy Hoevenaar lives in Brooklyn with his beautiful family. He is the author of Adaptations of Pelt and Hoof (H_NGM_N), Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement (American Books) and Our Insolvency (Resolving Host). His work has variously appeared in The Recluse, The Brooklyn Rail, A Perimeter, 6×6, Elderly, ‘Pider, Across the Margin and other publications.
Praise
"Identity feels likely.” Jeremy Hoevenaar’s Insolvency, Insolvency! cleanly and precisely provides a textual solution to the collective question of function vs. intention as we declare our human needs within an imploding economic system. The comic horror of his poetry gives the reader an extreme close-up on vocabularies that serve to commodify awareness itself. Nodal points where interactions, objects, and places as we know them in our paltry three dimensions intersect are held up, turned this way and that, and mercilessly delineated. But not by the kind of language that will give them depth. Focus is achieved, rather, through terms that flatten the elements (the “merge” command in Photoshop) using a post-digital point of view and creating equivalences of event, content, response. Hoevenaar builds the pre-future as we cross its threshold, thumbs to the ready. His willful dive into an alienating space of contemporary language is a test of which states of the inauthentic are at work in any moment. He asks whether these states actually remain inauthentic or might they credibly describe our reality? Insolvency, Insolvency! is writing beyond theory, a specific warning about what is in the offing, and is the kind of science fiction you know we will one day awaken to.
Cecilia Dougherty
Making a precise and brilliant artwork out of the transaction-speak of the internet and the baked-in indeterminacy of theory talk, Hoevenaar's poems have the circuitry and compressed connection you'll find once you scalpel out the microchip they'll soon implant in your skull. These are multisyllabic bars of actuarial nerdrap, featuring an exacting stutter-rhythm, and with a fragment-studded and polished lyric. Want to know what our insolvent and complicit-making world looks like from the inside out? Follow Insolvency, Insolvency!'s links.
Eugene Lim
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Publication Details
Chapbook
Saddle-Stitched. 24 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: November 01 2017
Distribution: Direct Only