Mantis is captivated by Human Resources
'The avant-garde still exists - but now as guerrilla action. Perhaps Fukayama was right, and history is indeed coming to a close; the contemporary avant-garde poem is not in advance of an army but rather a pocket of resistance aware of its impermanence.
A way in to how much things have changed since Verlaine and Rimbaud is Rachel Zolf's Human Resources ... Zolf's work is an exhalation: one constrained not by the speaker's diaphragm, as in a sigh, but by the outside world, as by a breathalyzer or a hospital diagnostic. Lines begin with a voice attached but soon dissipate - into nonsense, cliché, entrepreneur-speak, disjunctive histories. Reading Zolf in her prose blocks provides a paraphrase-resistant experience of lifting the bell jar on human speech ...
Zolf is not a mystic: the poem evacuates into a void, perhaps, but one, to use her words, of the hyperdocument. In contrast to most of the fragment-crunching of the last forty years, what is new in her work is how the increasing distance of her lines from human speech convey a sense not of meaninglessness and ironic puncturing of 'human pretense,' but instead of a wrench by a hostile, inhuman mind. This violence goes right down to the book's jarring syllables; Zolf's prosody is accentual-syllabic and not, in contrast to most work today, sprung. Her lines pitter-patter like ball bearings on tin. They are not flung in the wide democratic rhythms of Walt Whitman...
Zolf is not a Romantic; her speakers are, when identifiable, more often than not the very ones who have created the structures that batter them ... She fashions her line in the midst of a language-machine that, as it mirrors in a fantastic sense the workings-on of capitalism, produces a theatre of cruelty for the speaker. Less a tactician with a novel technique, her work is - to take a line from the anarchist thought that pervaded the avant-garde of the 19th century - a kind of inverse propaganda-of-the-deed where the decreation of the voice is repeated unto death ...
It is Zolf's work that is perhaps the most radical, the most provocative of the avant-gardists here: on the boundary between poem and life one feels the battering viscerally, in the very rhythms of the work'
