Black Radish Books
ISBN: 9780982573129
RRP: $15.00
168pp.
Reviewed by Nicky Tiso
Occultations is a fiercely intimate, original, and complex work. Written thru carefully constructed somatic/corporeal rituals (such as feeding words to a fire and covering oneself in the ash, being fed another's writing while writing, writing thru one's recorded intercourse) that articulate the body as it assumes various postures of existence, from the tortured detainee to an infomercial to one's own ghost. Using elements of tonalism and objectivism, like a jazzier George Oppen, these movements in actual space-time get rendered typographically as well as sonically in beautifully layered syncopations. We see and hear the narrator producing and restricting their own subjectivity in a cycle of surveillance that mimics today's invasive security culture, where neoliberal paranoia has us policing our own behavior and clinging to fascistic norms out of fear of persecution. The book searches for a home, an authorship, within this new age of empire that has us exiled from our own bodies, where not even our interiors are safe, by purging what biopowers arrest it. Where others resist, Wolach submits, but does so as a form of protest, of exorcism, that makes for a highly erotic read.
