Relief

Steven Zultanski

Relief is a book of eleven poems that revolve around familiar experiences of discontinuous time: illness, recovery, habit, sleep, talk, forgetfulness. Most of the texts are built from a number of moving parts that tend to lurch from one to another: transcribed speech, malformed poetry, and sub-allegorical sci-fi narratives. Relief treats health and sickness as inherently shared conditions, both interpersonal and impersonal. Private anxieties are inseparable from communal joys. Care is messed up, disjointed. Mundane conversations are occasions for rest and contentment, or not. Grotesque fantasies are also occasions for rest and contentment, or not. Sweet, intimate, and a little gross, Relief is an intricately detailed and formally uneven affirmation of daily life. It also touches on: body horror, vernacular knowledge of complex systems, juvenile humor, intergenerational psychic structures, banal forms of time travel, the ceaseless circulation of money, bad jobs, alternate dimensions, nostalgia, personal and social grooming, and the pleasures of self-pity.