"There is a sense / in which / you are interfering"
Universe is a long poem about exemplarity. Here, for example, hair-cutting, the wearing of hats, and soviet bacilli stand in for questions about consent, social conventions, and racism. Taking these substitutions largely from texts on moral philosophy, the poem rewrites them in and out of their original contexts. In this new, all-the-more exemplary world of pushing and shoving, someone has wronged someone. But who? The revenge is combinatory, and the lines are short.
Excerpt ˇExcerpt
* * *
If you stop me
from cutting
your hair,
there is a sense
in which
you are interfering.
*
But, since you are entitled
to determine
whether I cut your hair
or not, you do not
wrong me.
*
I make your trip to the store a waste.
*
I buy the last quart of milk
before you
get there.
*
Close ˆAbout the Author
Diana Hamilton is the author of two books of poetry—God Was Right (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse) and Okay, Okay (Truck Books)—and four chapbooks: Universe (Ugly Duckling Presse), Some Shit Advice (The Physiocrats), 23 Women to Kiss Before You Die (Make Now Books), and Break Up (Troll Thread). She collaborated with Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford to create the videogame Diana Hamilton’s Dreams (Gauss PDF), and she’s been a writer/artist-in residence at the Blackacre Writing Residency and BHQFU. Poems and critical essays have also appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Tender, Revue svetovej literatúry, Lambda Literary, Rabbit Poetry, Social Text Journal, Bomb Magazine, Prelude, The Fanzine, Open House, Convolution, Amodern, Imperial Matters, P-QUEUE, Esopus, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, among others. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and she current serves as the Acting Director of Baruch College’s Writing Center.
Book Details
ChapbookSaddle-Stitched. 36 pp, 5.25 x 8 in.
Publication Date: December 20, 2014
Distribution: Direct only
Funding: New York State Council on the Arts
- 03.03.15 | Diana Hamilton's Universe reviewed in New Pages
News and Reviews
Advance Praise
Praise for previous work:—Jordan Davis
From the apology for feeling in the Radioheadesque title to the ungoogleable narrative that closes the book, Okay, Okay is resolutely not an invitation to share an inside joke or an appeal to intellectual vanity. The feelings may be borrowed, quoted, distorted and inverted; they may take time to come into focus; nevertheless, they are real and strange and there every time the book falls open.
Her poetry—almost all of which is in rendered in prose, almost all of which is one-dimensional in the best possible sense of that word—forces Okay, Okay’s reader to examine and reexamine what is surely one of the most primal, instinctive of mammalian acts.—Jeff Alessandrelli