5/4/15

Joey Yearous-Algozin's verbatim transcription of three years of voicemail addressed to his partner Holly Melgard. Catching hold of the ultimate ephemera, this brilliant, uh compulsively readable act of medium translation is also a virtuosic performance of genre-bending



Joey Yearous-Algozin, Holly Melgard’s Friends & Family, Bon Aire Projects, 2014.
 

For three years, Joey Yearous-Algozin transcribed Holly Melgard’s voicemails.

in a new mode of um exquisite equivocation between a lover’s devotion and his exploitation, between his attention and his appropriation, between his care and his um violation, Holly Melgard’s Friends & Family archives Joey Yearous-Algozin’s verbatim transcription of three years of voicemail addressed to his partner Holly Melgard   catching hold of the ultimate ephemera, this brilliant, uh compulsively readable act of medium translation is also a virtuosic performance of genre-bending, as HMFF runs the gamut of conceptualism, confessional um lyric, documentary, life-writing, novella…  21C kin to Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Yearous-Algozin’s work torques that model by not ventriloquizing Ms. Melgard directly but instead uh uh uncannily channeling callers who contour her absence    in the age of SMS and email, the voice message has its own place in the ecology of immediacy and too closeness   HMFF not only flaunts its intimacy (so who um authorized this?) but tenderly weaponizes it, the reader entrapped as solicited eavesdropper in an all-too-uh-uh-familiar contemporary circuit of oversharing, as those in-network and the Hollys they apostrophize are dispossessed and given up to exposure   the book’s genius lies most uh evidently in this cast of characters and the composite portrait they create: bots who oblige Melgard as consumer-debtor (and as patient) to service her service relations; friends in her web of reciprocity at home in Buffalo; friends far flung who find Melgard um elusive but love her dearly; and, centrally, her nuclear family, who continually summon her as anchor of their affective economy as HMFF amply and movingly documents white, working class precarity, Melgard’s own complex class affinities and more especially her affective labor as daughter are brought into relief   at times fiscally but always affectively, Melgard is called on, called up to absorb a continuous string of micro- and macro-crises even as she is also positioned as receptacle of excess love   if Yearous-Algozin’s own voice joins these market forces of desire and need – “sorry for being a grumplestiltskin give me a call ok I love you” – his book knows it does not just represent but is itself inserted into that economy of affect   thus perhaps the flipside of HMFF’s um macho propriety over Melgard’s messages, its gendered debasement of the love object in abject disclosure, is Yearous-Algozin’s over-identification with his lover   and perhaps such listening to and (word-) processing of all that she has heard enacts a therapeutic commoning and lessening of its burdens   to respond to that FAQ: I don’t think um you don’t need to change your plan to get Holly Melgard’s Friends & Family   but um I don’t know if uh uh this means it won’t change you.  Judith Goldman

Trisha Low: Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Joey Yearous-Algozin


WHITE TRASH
HOLLY MELGARD JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
TROLL THREAD 2014
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
POETRY WALL STREET VISUAL POETRY
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
TROLL THREAD 2014
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
ZERO DARK 30 PT. FONT
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
TROLL THREAD 2013
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
REAL KILL LIST
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
TROLL THREAD 2013
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: MYDEATHSPACE.COM
TROLL THREAD 2013
VOL. 1: PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
VOL. 2: PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
VOL. 3: PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: NINE ELEVEN
TROLL THREAD 2012
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: HEAVEN
TROLL THREAD 2012
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
CHRIS SYLVESTER JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
POETRY WALL STREET
TROLL THREAD 2012
DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: NIGHT AND FOG
TROLL THREAD 2012
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
9/11 911 CALLS IN 911 PT. FONT
TROLL THREAD 2012
PART 1: PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
PART 2: PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOEY YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: FACES OF DEATH
TROLL THREAD 2012
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JOSEPH YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
BURIED
TROLL THREAD 2011
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD
JOSEPH YEAROUS-ALGOZIN
THE LAZARUS PROJECT: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR
TROLL THREAD 2010
PURCHASE | DOWNLOAD

Joey Yearous-Algozin is the author of The Lazarus Project (TROLL THREAD, GaussPDF), Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family (Bon Aire Projects) and Caller (Company Books, Spring 2016), among others. He co-edits TROLL THREAD with Holly Melgard and Chris Sylvester. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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