Like a post-conceptual Pompeii, Shiv Kotecha’s EXTRIGUE archives the rubble of language as forensics. Freud's Little Hans meets Lynch's Mullholland Drive. EXTRIGUE works
repetition and perception in order to collapse time. Through his
numbered sequencing of the human stain, Kotecha pulls us into an endless
present: “345. A FLAME THAT FADES INTO A PHONE A MAN THAT FADES INTO A
MAN A LAMP THAT FADES INTO A BOOK SMOKE THAT FADES INTO A HAT.“ EXTRIGUE, outside of self, is the canoptic jar of the now.
―KIM ROSENFIELD
Description
and counting. Where counting things is also just counting and
describing things is also just describing. Things happen and counting
and describing happen. What would it mean to make each of these a
temporary enjoyment zone? What about the temporary enjoyment zone that
somehow happens between these zones? Shiv might know. Or at least EXTRIGUE knows it for him. It is nice of Shiv to set up a little gadget that
does this for him and does this for us (if we are lucky). What more
could we ask for? What more could we ask of him? Nothing. There is
nothing more or left to ask.
―CHRIS SYLVESTER
EXTRIGUE is
a severely empty poem. It might seem to be an exhaustive catalog, but
it is rigorously and laboriously blank. It might seem to be procedural,
but there is no action. It’s a really good and static book.
―STEVEN ZULTANKSI
“If the items (numbered) in EXTRIGUE resemble Objects, Rooms, and Foods we’ve grown accustomed to in Stein’s Tender Buttons, it is because PAUSE is the tenderest button of them all. She never could have known.“
―DIVYA VICTOR, The Poetry Foundation
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