Disapparitions by Joseph Harrington

Joseph Harrington’s Disapparitions gives new range to the idea of the open mic. Herein, the static and the interferences and the acts of situation and source are at once marvelously discernible on multiple frequencies, including the lower ones, the ones that speak to and from and—as Ellison said—for you. And the book also opens onto and mingles with and rides the air on which whole ideas of broadcast depend. It’s a book that traces the shaking ranges and the tentative possibilities of discernment—the voices of the dead, e.g, or “disembodied voices yakking, expressing our ‘selves’…” Harrington writes, “While we are trembling/ We are the language here.” Herein, the lucky reader will encounter all this and much more.

—C. S. Giscombe

Joseph Harrington is a maestro of hybrid form. His latest book, Disapparitions, collages politically urgent poetry and prose with an array of sampled and remixed voices that speak from the ghost-margins of our historical moment. It’s an eerily inventive, dialogic tour de force. Harrington’s multi-vocal orchestration cuts through “the aural fog of interference” and dramatizes the extent to which everyday speech is a function of what we mute. “Radio on earth is scandalous,” one of the book’s audibly inaudible voices tells us; “it is a mess there.” Still, Harrington suggests that if we listen closely to this deliberately strange aural landscape, we might be inspired to make a more equitable reality from our scandalous mess: “Put your ear to it. See what it has to say.”

—Tony Trigilio

What does it mean to listen to the troubled frequencies that haunt this country? Joe Harrington’s Disapparitions fine-tunes our attention to the historical intersections of race, surveillance, even the structures of listening itself. Through a mixture of documentary and procedural poems, memoir, and literary/cultural criticism, Harrington offers a necessary diagnosis of our uncanny present moment, in which whiteness speaks through a megaphone but cannot look in the mirror without seeing its own revenant. This book sends out a distress signal, but it’s a salutary one. A diagnosis can be the first step toward healing, or a cure.

—Siobhán Scarry

Joseph Harrington is the author of Of Some Sky (BlazeVOX Books); Goodnight Whoever’s Listening (Essay Press); Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan); and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan), among other works.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-444-4