Jeremy Allan Hawkins a French-American poet and author of A Clean Edge (BOAAT, 2017), selected by Richard Siken as winner of the 2016 BOAAT Chapbook Prize. His poetry has been selected for the Best New Poets anthology series, and the extended program of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennial. He is a lecturer at the Strasbourg National School of Architecture and pursues research at the points of contact between poetic practices and spatial design.
Twitter: @jeremyallan Instagram: @jeremyhawkins http://www.jeremyhawkins.com
Introduction
A note on the text:
This book represents an attempt to transform a corpus of material I originally wrote as a journalist covering European politics in crisis, a corpus that over time has come to represent, in my eyes, complicity with institutional cruelty. Eventually it became clear to me that I needed to submit that writing to a process of détournment, so as to, on one hand, break the false veneer of objectivity or impartiality, and on the other, to reactivate the text in ways that would reveal the already embedded logics hidden within. While writing, I made use of a variety of strategies, including text randomizers, collage techniques, erroneous translation, and language filters, varying these predominantly material practices through the different pieces. The result is, I think, a text that makes apparent the constant violence of our political discourse, which is in turn transmitted, amplified, and even enacted by the organs and agents of the apparatuses of power. In that sense, this work represents a kind of testimony and confession. I wish it had less pertinence today than when it was first written, but then the sea around which we talked continues to open and receive.
Preview
Global economic forecast optimistic despite uncertainty 130 people dead, & in July, which she confirmed. the much loved a bad future for the next. what can companies do? its wish to define itself today as well as in screenings of Poltergeist, because from construction, lighting, & favour of a non-binding motion, the crowd lifted signs, consulates, the common good, he explained, optimistic about the long & repeated. despite that volatility, uncertainties are not for future growth, I believe. another critical is an assassination slamming its doors— the spokesperson held particular interests for debate: “let’s not fool living in poverty & dying for law enforcement purposes.” reminded of their reforms put forward in the context of the battle to build his most regular activity, walls, a long address to the pharmaceutical companies showed how the oil price & other talents have 15 months to transpose men originating from Sudan. he observed that many people since the end of the cold war work with the archbishop
Praise for the Work
Implausibly yet necessarily, enditem. shimmers with what could be called a “poetics of logistics,” re-arranging and recasting the bureaucratic language of distribution and circulation into a language of transcultural revolution. Jeremy Allan Hawkins presents a portrait of “the European project” that reveals the hypocrisy behind borders closed to bodies but open to markets, as well as tracks the role Global English plays in both distorting and codifying lived, local experience. However, Hawkins also shows us that ambivalence and malleability are written into the language, such that “end item” becomes enditem., less a finalized product for sale than the poetic imperative to keep connecting, configuring, and mobilizing. —Mia You, author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016)
Jeremy Allan Hawkins’s collection enditem. employs collage to juxtapose pieces of current events —war, entertainment, commerce, geopolitical haggling and its human cost— against one another. Built with the language of news articles, Hawkins crafts a sharp portrait of our lived moment, vibrating with the “uncertainties that persist,” and “political catastrophic stupidity” of global proportions. This project emphasizes the schism between our felt and lived realities, amid the ongoing violence of wars, displaced communities, destruction. Readers will find themselves entranced with the language we are fed, only to have it reveal itself as poem, riddle, and ouroboros. —Avni Vyas, author of Little God (Burrow Press, 2021)
Using techniques regularly applied in found poetry and avant-garde writing and superimposing them on his own past texts Jeremy Allan Hawkins executes a rare act of poetic emancipation towards the hegemonic discourses of our time and their echoes in our own voices and writing. enditem. is a disruptive piece of textual technology, elegant in its realization, intensely stimulating in its conceptual provocations and infinitely entertaining in its innovation. —Robert G. Elekes, author of O dronă care să mă vrea în sfârșit doar pe mine (a drone that will finally love me, Max Blecher publishing house, 2018)
Beir Bua Press 