The archive is all in present tense
Winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Books Prize
Cover art by Dorothy Hoover
Cover art by Dorothy Hoover
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"Step right up! And step right into this mysterious, sumptuous, and scintillating magical library and dream archive that is all at once refuge, spectacle, reverie, cabaret, and labyrinth. In these remarkable poems Elizabeth Hoover transforms the dusty old archive into a wonderland and sensorium, a site for earthing and unearthing the past and present not so much through catalogued evidence but through wild and joyful invention. In elegiac, maximalist, and cinematic poems that interweave and echo back on each other the archive becomes a metamorphizing space: a music box, a kissing booth for ghosts, aquarium, concertina wire, a sister’s basketball stats, spring snow, mournful musk oxen, rugged mountaineers. We meet a shape-shifting archivist with a radio transmitter tongue who fashions marionettes, wears green beret fatigues, twirls a white parasol, and eases a gas mask off a goldfinch. In Hoover’s astonishing imagination these poems subvert and reckon with our notions of memory and what it means to collect and catalogue. With great lyric verve, she explores institutional negligence, slippages and spillages around categorization, and how we can perhaps forgive ourselves for needing categorization. In this astonishingly beautiful debut collection Hoover shows us that the archive is ultimately a supreme act of the imagination." --Catherine Bowman, author of Can I Finish, Please? |
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the archive is all in the present tense is an intensely cinematic collection of poems, intensely erotic and equally cerebral, where you the reader will descend into archival folds making the body negative space gathered “in clutches of sleeves and slacks, cabals of houndstooth and hoopskirts,” in a restless, inescapable, eternal now.
To write is to rewrite with letters old and newer, alphabets of the past, surging into the present, being reused, remade, where the self is both trapped and sublime in “an asterisk of light scatter prismatic rainbows above // the reshelving station.”
Here is where we can find the archetype, the authority, the minor god of “The Archivist, all glint and wink, // is tilting a lens” and what can we do but “follow their ruffled skirts, / swear the edges of their petticoats are dipped in gold.” In Elizabeth Hoover’s bewitching, tightly-focused poems, we fight to surface, we are breathless, we are material culture, we are object-subjects, we observe our own archivals as we are “made to be made /Victory / Empire / Change / Thorn and Scepter / Crown/”
--Sun-Yung Shin, author of The Wet Hex and Unbearable Splendor
"the archive is all in present tense works like a preservationist who leaves breadcrumbs for the generations that follow, so they’ll understand what was vital and what will continue to be vital for their time. Both the inventiveness of the conceit and the urgency in the content are incredibly compelling, and the language on these lines holds the passion
of the present progressive.
Sit down, put on your white gloves, and explore!"
--A Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again
of the present progressive.
Sit down, put on your white gloves, and explore!"
--A Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again
