Asbestos, Duct Tape, Willow Bark :: Joe Hall (with Ryan Kaveh Sheldon)
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An Excerpt
How does a book honor its materials? What if we call a decaying object imprinted or mixed with text precarious and that precarity calls out to the reader for a relation of caretaking? Some texts must be handled with care. A reader may need to summon their attention into their fingertips, to enter with the text into a different somatic assembly. (We don’t provide white gloves.) One may need to ask the material of the book how to follow the text. And to treat the process of conversation with care. One doesn’t assume anything about the text-object’s place in the public sphere. One may need to deliver that thing personally to an audience. This may mean holding the writer, the readers—their wants, needs, and interests—in mind.
THE BOOK
Asbestos, Duct Tape, Willow Bark: 8 Notes on Heading Toward Hostile Books is the fifth essay in the Poetics of the Handmade Series, which asks writer-bookmakers to discuss the whys, hows, and wherefores of micropress publishing. This essay and conversation focuses on the work of Buffalo, NY collective, Hostile Books (2016-2020), and considers archives, rust belt sensibilities, the market as a non-neutral location, and the embrace of the hostile interface.
THE AUTHORS
Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, most recently People Finder, Buffalo (2024), Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). With Chad Hardy, he co-authored The Container Store Vols I & II (2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored the chapbook May I Softly Walk (2014). Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and/or rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. From 2016-2020, he participated in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality, with Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong,
Ryan Kaveh Sheldon is Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College. His research examines the interplay of quantitative reasoning, colonial governance, and form in long eighteenth-century British Atlantic writing. His creative and critical work has appeared in Small Po[r]tions, Poor Claudia, wildness, DIAGRAM, and Jacket2. With Veronica Wong and Joe Hall, he co-edited Hostile Books, a micro-press/book arts collective.
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