Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into themachine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption.

Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen,reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste – and the creative potential of salvage.

‘In this bad-mouthing and incandescent burlesque, Rachel Zolf transforms a necessary social anger into the pure fuel that takes us to “the beautiful excess of the unshackled referent.�* We learn something new about guts, and about how dictions slip across one another, entwining, shimmering, wisecracking. For Zolf,political invention takes precedent, works the search engine.’ – Lisa Robertson

Syd Zolf’s writing practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her books of poetry include Neighbour Procedure (2010); Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award; Masque (2004), finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; and Her absence, this wanderer (1999). Among her many collaborations with other artists, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women's Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami 2012. She has taught at New York’s The New School University and the University of Calgary.

Syd Zolf's profile page