Poetry. Joe Hall and Chad Hardy's THE CONTAINER STORE explores the construction, implementation, and erosion of economic and social authority, commodity, and corporeality. As both found and original language moves from domestic space to city, office-scape, and borderland (economic, political, bodily), it examines the (lack of) agency that the individual has in a world flooded with borders, bodies, commodities, contracts, and fragment. The work that Hall and Hardy undertake here is reminiscent of 20th century experimental movements such as Situationism, Futurism, and Dada, as well as 21st century net art like that of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. It is a mash up of high art and the profane, a typographical assault. The book itself is an enactment of the very spectacle that it reveals.

The Container Store

Literature & Fiction

Hall, Joe

Hardy, Chad

Poetry

SpringGun Press

Poetry. PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan's hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.

Pigafetta Is My Wife

Black Ocean

Poetry. Joe Hall is a devout poet. He is devoted to trailer parks, the drafty inner spaces of domesticity where we cry out for our lady help. He finds god, saints, saviors, in spiders in a woodpile. For Hall, poetry cannot hold anything if it doesn't break. Here, god is amputated from the ground, and the ground is opening its devouring mouth. THE DEVOTIONAL POEMS is a prayer—a prayer by evangelical AM radio, oxycodone addiction, white pines, and the death of everything the body knows through sickness. A prayer written while walking along a state road and down into a ravine day after day. These poems ask to be your sustaining and poisonous vegetation. Pay your devotion here. "The world is constantly being ripped limb from limb in these poems, teeming as we are with beasts and bees and phantoms and hermaphrodites and dudes. Devoted, yes, to terror, but true too to the gorgeous black underbelly of how we're all at once somehow together possessed. Joe Hall breeds electricity to breathe by again and again. He eats and regurgitates an unblinking, brilliant, sacred eye."—Blake Butler "This is a book with a basic religion, which shifts and turns its shade upon looking, drawing its colors from The Book of Revelation as much as from the kinder spirit books. It is a sacred text where Hall becomes the 'singing corpse,' not 'dragged across this landscape,' but instead the singing thing dancing across the hills and valley."—Dorothea Lasky "Hall's devotions uncover 'in the derelict warehouse's silence' a worldly utopia grown fat on the carcasses of lifeless heavens: 'This is where I stick my head in the liquid / fire of the sun and piss myself while / burning vistas multiply.'"—J. Michael Martinez

The Devotional Poems

These are poems that rock you like a tilt-a-whirl, off-kilter and non-stop. In this collection of poems by Joe Hall, you might find yourself laid off at a cannabis grow or vomiting gold. You might find yourself screaming in your underwear at the tech bro in the derelict arcade in your head. You might find your despair here or a gentle sign of change. Many of the poems here unearth histories in which people refuse the systems that designate them waste or wastable in hyper-compacted blocks of poetry and prose. Defiant, funny, and gentle, this book braids the panic-inducing catastrophes of now with a long view of solidarity in struggle.

Fugue and Strike

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hall, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hall, Joe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hall, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Container Store

Pigafetta Is My Wife

The Devotional Poems

Fugue and Strike