Read Me: Selected Works

Holly Melgard

ART, CRITICISM, ESSAY, POETRY  |  $20 $18

September 2023
Read an excerpt

Excerpt from “Stay” (2011)

—for loop pedal

Ok, hold it just like that. No, like that. Yeah, that. No, no, just freeze! And, hold it, hold it, hold it. Hold it please. Hold on. Please. Please? PLEASE?! Please be still. Stay like that. Yeah, just like that. No, not like that, no—yes—no. No! No no, hold. Hold! Shh! Hold it!

Ok, can you stop breathing? Seriously, stop breathing, and just freeze. You move when you breath, so stop breathing. Just hold it in. No, hold it in. And hold a little longer—hold it, hold it. Hold it?! Keep holding. Whatever you do, don’t breath. Don’t breath. No no no no no don’t! Sh sh sh sh sh sh sh. It’s ok.

Ok, so then hold it. Don’t move. You’re moving, when I specifically asked you not to move. Be perfectly still! Be still. Be still! Shh. Please oh please be still. Don’t move! I said don’t move. Just be still, and don’t—no no. Don’t move don’t don’t. No no no don’t don’t don’t! Just, Shhhh!

Ok, just wait. Hang on, not yet. Just wait. Hang on hang on hang on, just hang on. Just freeze. Hang in there. Hang on. I got this, just wait. Just you wait. Wait for it wait for it, hang on hang on hang on. No, wait. No. Wait for it! Woah woah woah wait wait wait. No no. Just wait—Wait! Shhh!

[Holly Melgard] gives me hope.

Lucy Ives

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out. From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

About the Author

Holly Melgard is the author of Fetal Position (Roof), named by Jackie Ess as one of Artforum’s “Best of 2021.” In addition to publishing the chapbooks Catcall (UDP) and Divisions of Labor (Make Now), she has also self-published ten books of poetry on Troll Thread press, including Black Friday and The Poems for Baby trilogy, as well as the co-authored books (along with Joey Yearous-Algozin) White Trash and Liquidation. She is a co-editor and designer of Troll Thread press (co-founded with Yearous-Algozin, Chris Sylvester, and Divya Victor), which is a print-on-demand / free pdf download platform. Having performed her work at such sites as the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, her work has also appeared in BOMB Magazine, Best American Experimental Poetry anthology, and was translated in the German journal Merkur. She wrote her doctorate in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program on Poetics of Ubiquitization: Textual Conditions of and for the Ubiquitous Computing Age. A recent guest faculty in the Banff Winter Writers Retreat, she currently teaches writing at New York University and City University of New York, freelance book designs, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Praise

Holly Melgard infiltrates some of the most infernal folds in what's left of literature. It gives me hope.

Lucy Ives

Holly Melgard is wicked smart. No poet more quickly or perceptively understood the intersections of digital media, labor, finance, gender, and affect that circumscribe our current social condition. To be sure, you’re being trolled. But for once you’re being trolled by someone fearless – and more intelligent than you. Read Me is a double dare.

Craig Dworkin

Aggregating a decade and a half of experiment, Holly Melgard’s Read Me channels the groans and frequencies of communicating understanding that make bespoke address even a little bit possible. In these poems and essays, no détourn of the mouth, mind, or page goes uncorrected.

Shiv Kotecha

This irreverent collection clearly demonstrates that Melgard is of our most insightful thinkers about the relationships among text, material, labor and publishing. (That's my contribution to the paratextual materials arranged by the publisher to facilitate the positive reception of this book.)

Allison Parrish

In the News

Links

Troll Thread Press

Previous publications by Holly Melgard:
Fetal Position (Roof Books, 2021)
Poems for Baby trilogy

From Troll Thread:
The Making of The Americans
Black Friday
Reimbursement
White Trash (co-authored with Joey Yearous-Algozin)
Liquidation (co-authored with Joey Yearous-Algozin)

Cats Can’t Taste Sugar (Gaus PDF)
Catcall (UDP)
Divisions of Labor (MakeNow)

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-04-0
Trade Paperback
320 pp, 4.5 x 7 in
Publication Date: September 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)