Fugue and Strike

A poet, critic, and junk bookmaker, Joe Hall is conducting a lifelong investigation into the intersections of labor, ecology, imagination, and structures of violence. He is the author of Pigafetta Is My Wife, The Devotional Poems, and Someone’s Utopia, all also published by Black Ocean. He has performed nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and rivers. His writing has appeared in places like Poetry Daily, Postcolonial Studies, Best Buds! Collective, terrain.org, Peach Mag, PEN America Blog, and an NFTA bus shelter. He lives in Buffalo, NY.

“Joe Hall's Fugue and Strike combines deep, involved observation of the ongoing now (in all its crisis-inflected forms) with an exploration of past refusals of the process of becoming waste. In the thick of an endless fight for liveable life, Hall presents parallel wastages—both the people made into waste by state and socioeconomic violence, and the excess objects, fragments, sites, and molecules generated by the same violence. The fugue of navigating a breathlessly gentrified, financialized city space leads to a time-hopping study of garbage handlers' strikes. These poems recognize what happens when we ‘try to say 'No'’ but ‘on Monday the manager confiscated [our]'N,' on Friday [our] 'O'.’ Word fails, action arises, and somehow, along with it, hope. Any reader sharing this fugue/strike might say, ‘I felt the tip of something I could not see in me that trembles,’ and know that it is not just fear.” —Jay Besemer“Joe Hall vomits gold. In Fugue & Strike, poetry hovers spectrally above the infrastructures of the capitalist machine, laying bare its circuitry and potential oblivion: tech bros and muscular Ivy League dads are robbed. A missive smeared in excrement becomes a manifesto. Mutiny is declared against poetic form. Cops and scabs murder each other. In its close examination of the void between labor and commodity, pleasure and oblivion, Hall’s terrifying and often hilarious book envisions ‘a space of public salvage,’ a global common that stretches from Buffalo to Ithaca, to the world. These poems will make you want to strike, fight back, and leave a burning bag of shit on your boss’s doorstep—and for that, we need them. Joe Hall is one of the greatest poets we have.” —Marty Cain"Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line."—The Boston Globe"A radically original and experimental work. . . . Fugue and Strike insists that poetry is inseparable from the material world that produces it. . . . The text contends that there is such a thing as public space and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty."—Cleveland Review of Books