DOCUMENT
by Elizabeth Fodaski
"Document’s ludic lyrics bounce off everyday life and into a field of poetic perception, leaving everything in its place but palpably transformed. These palpitations are the rhythm of Fodaski’s poems, which resist the formulaic in their oscillation between displacement and reinvention; as if you could see the world from the outside while still being in it."
- Charles Bernstein
"Elizabeth Fodaski’s Document is a multi-scaled embrace of a shifting world. What is within the arms of the poets’ reach? It’s the 'Drudge' of Elizabethness: placing the poet inside the poem to be repeatedly objectified within shifting contexts. It’s the poet willingly placed within “the desperate masses of / an irreducible margin' where she yet insists 'the history of the field could be traced to one tree.' Fodaski writes a world where the borders flow back and forth between the collective '. . . consolation of a comfortable disaster / colonizing the accessible / chambers / of the heart' and the 'shouldered / weightless appendage / new love.' The simultaneous presence contains fear and love, loss and hope and subverts the superficial duality of its components. Not gone, not here – instead 'an array of things / we love to have written, / bleed to love.'"
- Diane Ward
"In the nervy, emotionally muted, and genre foot-loose 'post-language' writing scene of the 1990’s, Elizabeth Fodaski was a writer that many of us didn’t just 'like,' but absolutely revered. Always the designer & engineer of writing instances--from the bottom up (in contrast to merely elasticizing pre-existing writerly habits--à la early 2000’s) Fodaski’s poetics remains a beacon for innovative ways to re-cut the problematic of representation. This much-awaited new installment to her poetic trajectory is truly a cause for celebration. Document demonstrates that a micro-to-macro-and-back scaling of social meaning is still a horizon worth exploring. Striking in this collection are the artful synchronizations of the social surround’s harder edges with 'internal meditation' after-image effects; many other effects abound. If the buzz today is all about “re-purposing”--in technology, art, urbanization, and politics, then this is re-purposing in and of poetic thought. "
- Rodrigo Toscano
Elizabeth Fodaski was born and raised in New York City, where she still lives. She published and edited the poetry magazine Torque from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was also a curator for The Segue Foundation’s reading series. The author of Fracas, Fodaski teaches English at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.