Poetry Pamphlet

SPAM Press, May 2022

Paperback, 44 pages

ISBN: 978-1-915049-10-0

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TRAVESTY58 is an experimental pamphlet that over- and under- writes the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching. Focusing on Hexagram 58—the Joyous Lake—as its central anchor, this text blends procedural digital-language techniques in order to generate a new hyper-textual divining manual: a reassembled Lake whose surface is clogged with toxic translation detritus, phantom spam calls, invasive robot squirrels, George Oppen's wooden cabinets, and shreds of yellow skin.

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REVIEWS

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'In Jay Gao's new pamphlet, 'virtual ghosts' reconfigure inert, recently shed skin to create an opaque shelter. For whom? Questions of home and touch co-mingled, for me, to generate a poetics both bodily and with-held. From whom? Thinking is private. 'EMPTIED. BACKSPACE'. Yes. Like that.'

Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash a Heart

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'Jay Gao shreds the received text of the I Ching, smashes hegemonic translations with new procedures, pollutes nostalgia with corrupted files. TRAVESTY58 is meta data take over, a machine rereading with an oracular bent. The poet as mechanical Turk finds affinity with other lowly devices: printers, electric toothbrushes, and surveillance cameras. White is excretion, excess, scum. The page is toxic, melted, but also polished, varnished. Finding joy in the de-familiar, these poems harness the critical forces of detritus and refusal.'

J.R. Carpenter, author of An Ocean of Static