presented by The Quarterless Review
Intensive Maximalism: after Mike Kleine’s agbogbloshie by PJ Lombardo
“agbogbloshie is futurist, but not the way some readers might expect…Futurity is not fantasy: it is the pressure of today’s contradictions, bleating in your ear, right now. The future does not belong to VC-slurping Bay Area “neo-feudal” rubes or the carnival barkers of capitalist exhaustion. Futurity belongs only to those who can learn how to live in the drek, in all its tedium & tragedy & persistence..”
Alternate States of Burning: Place and Personhood in Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive by Alexandrine Ogundimu
“The cover of Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive features a red sign with a white X over it. Black text reads ‘CAUTION: UNSAFE TO FIRST RESPONDERS DO NOT ENTER OR OCCUPY.’ There’s a way to read this as titillation, as if the reader is being welcomed into something forbidden, but there’s another reading won out by the text itself: The lives the reader is about to dive into contain hazards.”
Writing the Wound: The Production of the Real in S.M.H.’s Cicatrization by Leonard Klossner
“The author, asked if they believe writing to be an engagement which nears the violence of a criminal act…responds that, for them, writing ‘is a sublimated impulse to commit anti-social violence against the whole of the civilized world,’ and that the highest honor would be for someone having read their work to become inspired to murder ‘someone important.'”
Dead to the World: on Bob Flanagan’s The Pain Journal by Adam Mitts
“Flanagan’s struggle with his doctors over painkillers isn’t only about access to drugs. It’s also about who gets to decide which forms of labor produce which forms of value from Flanagan’s dying body — whether he is profitable as a patient or an artist, and profitable to whom.”
*the header image, The Tortured Still Alive, is adapted from Enguerrand Quarton’s Pieta de Villeneuve
David Kuhnlein 