Georgia Straight commends the 'tough and funny' Human Resources

Everyday is the new black of contemporary poetry. The personal, the domestic, and the banal are no longer boring chatter but subject to a cultural articulation: the lingual equivalent of finding a great shirt at the back of your closet and having everyone say you look really cool in it.

Rachel Zolf takes everyday "plain language" and pulls it apart with abandon to see what it costs us under contemporary economic regimes in her book Human Resources (Coach House, $16.95). Her procedural combinations code a new type of embrace for language where "We want to use gibberish that reflects today's too-wide-open white page velcroed to the hip." She uses language to show how language sticks to us, often without our consent.

With these kinds of collisions between literary language and corporate-speak, Zolf creates a critique of how money continues to change hands: "With money keen on poesis, Kafka and Stevens sold peace of mind, Jabès stocks. Bataille stuck Dewey decimals on dough and we bought fashion insurance. Our parents fell in love at the archives, spent all the marbles they'd collected to that point."

She calls the currency of language into question, both playfully and forcefully. It's worth noting that Zolf works as a corporate-communications consultant, immersed in the language that became her material for this book. I like her excessive view: the book is tough and funny–no easy balance to achieve any day.