Checking In consists of the major title poem (which takes up about half the book) and a series of other post-conceptual pieces that luxuriate in the physicality and materiality of language and meaning production (featuring concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms). The title poem, "Checking In," composed as a series of single-line faux Facebook updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture; and as a euphoric eruption of "Alternative Facts" or "Fake News," is a satiric and playfully absurdist political commentary on U.S. politics. Each line erupts as a provocative self-reflexive mash-up that speaks to our ongoing desire for information while acknowledging how fraught with myth that information can be. Whether it's Ornette Coleman flying Jazz, Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants, Immanuel Kant liking No Doubt, or bill bissett and Slavov Zizek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In takes the reader on a satiric tour through the shards and fragments of literary and post-consumerist culture. It reminds us that we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us; and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking. Through rhythmic oscillation, dissonant ambiance, and sonoric exuberance, Checking In forges a site of radical grafting linkages, codes, indeces, and ludic identities; it rhapsodically erupts as a hypertextual twining of both intimate and social space. And, as an interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, updates, analysis, echoes, and provocations, re-presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities; inter-subjective theaters of infinite reframing. A celebratory rhapsody, reminding us how the Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. Its data is absurd, and as such speaks to the way we seek answers, but with answers to questions that have never been asked. We seek fulfillment but enter an unbound, unsettling, uninhibited flow of information where every data point only refers back to itself and the culture of techno-capitalism of the Web; performing a kind of nekuia (as Susan Howe invoking Robert Duncan) says in Spontaneous Particulars) - a rite whereby the dead are made to speak again. Or for Joyce (in Finnegan's Wake) - "a commodius vicus of recirculation."
About the Author :
Adeena Karasick is a Canadian, New York-based poet, performer, cultural theorist, and media artist and the author of eight books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as "electricity in language" (Nicole Brossard), "proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion" (George Quasha), noted for their "cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory" (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature 'syllabic labyrinth'" (Craig Dworkin). Most recently is Salome: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014). She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, is co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat, 2016 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient, and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The Adeena Karasick Archive has just been established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Review :
"Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious."—Jim Andrews, Jewish Independent
"Through her faux statuses, Karasick manages to draw our attention to the very fiber of language, as well as the linguistic constructs introduced into our lives by Facebook."
—Jake Marmer, Tablet
"Checking In contains a number of other memorable poetic experiments, including “Here Today Gone Gemara,” a poem with a distinctly Yiddish flavor, and various invented and inverted Yiddish proverbs."
—Jake Marmer, Tablet
