Rachel Zolf's Portland Reading reviewed!

Portland author Rodney Koeneke recently saw Rachel Zolf (Human Resources) read at the Spare Room Reading Series. He captured some of his feelings on his blog. Below, should you need further proof, is evidence why you must see Rachel Zolf read if she ever visits your town:

‘Rachel Zolf read from Human Resources, written during (and against) her time as an HR copywriter. Where I expected an ironic use of cube-speak to critique the whole corporate thing, Zolf instead delivered a profound exploration of how euphemism, bureaucratic codes, and numbers in certain combinations enabled the twentieth century. Socrates, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and the Harvard Business Review joined a chorus of anonymous voices (‘I didn’t write that. A machine wrote that’) that comment, Greek tragic-like, on the violence that hides beneath the codes we use to keep modernity moving.’

‘Zolf read at a lighting pace that tended to blur individual words and poems into a single unrelenting rhythm. It conveyed the anonymity and machine-like impersonality of the language her work was critiquing, and helped to foreground what may be its characteristic semantic mode - speed over meaning, more beat than ‘message’ (or is it that the beat is the message?). I wouldn’t miss her work however it finds you.’