Human Resources

Microreview: Human Resources

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Human Resources

Rachel Zolf

Coach House Books, 2007

Having read a little about Human Resources, I suspected I might 'get' the project pretty quickly and not need or want to finish the whole thing.

Rachel Zolf's new book of poems, Human Resources, enters the tradition of innovative poets writing about Capital by joining it with her exploration of what it means to occupy a lyric subject in our own cultural moment. The book -- through its use of poetry generating programs, corporate instructions for writers, and word database lists -- fashions a subject recognizable to us, one that is multiple and shaped by the IMF, the WTO, and our personal, unavoidable shopping and employment conditions.

Human Resources is the third book of poetry by Rachel Zolf, a writer who capitalizes upon her experience as a part-time employee, composing copytexts for a corporate clientele. Influenced by the ideas of George Bataille (who discusses a 'general economy' of exchange based, not upon recouped scarcity, but upon wasteful excesses), Zolf provides a political critique of quotidian language under capitalism. She showcases the power of poetry to offer us more radical options for expression.

"Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (Coach House Books, 2007) takes on the idea of language 'play' making language work and making that work evident in a way that's fun and funny. I have just contradicted myself, yet in attempting to 'describe' Zolf's work contradiction seems entirely appropriate.

Like an ethnographer of language usage in the corporate world, Zolf shatters dialectics of participant versus observer by pushing the language system both within and beyond capacity.

Sang Kim is a Korean-Canadian playwright whose second play, A Dream Called Laundry (KCLF-21, $17.99), deals with the trauma inflicted on survivors of a Japanese Imperial Army rape-camp in Korea in the mid-1940s and their overseas offspring in the later 1970s.

Jewish-Canadian writer Rachel Zolf’s third book of poetry, Human Resources (Coach House, $16.95), extends the verbal and linguistic experimentation of her first two, short-listed books, Masque (2004) and Her absence, this wanderer<