Prefab Eulogies, Volume 1 by David Wolach

Prefab Eulogies is fresh, fragmented, daring, a swarm of language that teases, provokes, tickles and frustrates, this is poetry for a frantic yet exhausted empire.

—Linh Dinh

David Wolach’s powerpoems imagine us into a world where prefab texts, codes, lists, templates, and schemas rebel into habitations, “testy machines” and “the dumpster in a field abandoned by an American minimalist.” Wolach projects an archive of visual-textual trivia onto a manuscript wall behind which The Office meets Duchamp meets pornified hip meets Avant-Garde, then sticks a price tag on his precise mess-cosmos and bulldozes right through. Prêt-a-lire never had it so right-on funny or fierce.  Box it to go and take it away.

—Amy King

In Prefab Eulogies, Volume 1 poetry meets positivism on the shimmery dance floor of our eternal present. Along the way, David Wolach raises a slew of alluring quandaries: How can the body be a site of resistance? In what ways are we already fabricating our still-to-be-cooked–up demise? How can Wittgenstein help us decode the USA PATRIOT Act? Was “our fetish commodified long before PATCO”? Is it possible to out-Flarf Flarf? Prefab Eulogies encourages multi-channel collectivity that demands we read—and act—with a finger on the trigger of forgiveness, with an eye trailing reclamation.

—Jules Boykoff

Prefab Eulogies’ Power Point Poetics offer an economy of voices that is both a blast and a schematic of the nail meeting the coffin. David Wolach is a tease—charting our desire to establish an order. Here, a series of poems “after” other poets voices both conversation and critique. Here, Wolach fucks (with) his friends. These poems come after poetry. A poetry where they say this. They say that. They say. Prefab Eulogies’ pervasive irony and recursive stabs say, “Wolach is a genius. His flippant hipsterism arcs the project.”  Prefab Eulogies says, “poetry eulogizes itself.”  David Wolach says, “Isn’t all art dead once it’s made? Isn’t it the doing or making, call it living poetically, that is the only living facet to the whole ordeal? Aren’t we confusing poetry with product?” Prefab Eulogies tells us it is time to say goodbye.  It is later than you think.

—Catherine Taylor

______________
David Wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, & curator of the series devoted to the intersection of experiments in texts & radical politics, PRESS. Wolach’s most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, forth. 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth. 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). His work has most recently appeared in or is forthcoming from 5_Trope, Aufgabe, Jacket, No Tell Motel, & Little Red Leaves. In collaboration with composer Arun Chandra, Wolach is currently working on an 8-channel sound-text piece for four voices, a transcription from a section of Occultations, “Modular Arterial Cacophony,” to be performed in late 2010. Wolach is professor of text arts, aesthetics, & poetics The Evergreen State College & visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.

Prefab Eulogies Volume 1- Nothings Houses by David Wolach Book Preview