The writings in Judith Goldman’s DeathStar/rico-chet are constructions engaging present events—catastrophes—the origin of which is being defined, in the sense of framed, by the term “tragedy” in current media. Goldman’s writings are enactments, not of the events themselves, nor are they descriptions of the events: They are enactments making a present in the speaking (as of Shakespearean, of current media, and of Goldman)—and enactments as thinking reframing being present. Thinking is her constructs, as such experiments. She’s made brilliant juxtapositions that may be exactly the same as the languages they were (or not), and that as such don’t either iterate or describe events. Rather than trapped in this current time’s enclosure, the reader is alert in Goldman’s passionate bombardment.
This book is dedicated to those on all sides imprisoned, wounded, and/or killed in the course of 9/11, America’s war on terrorism, its war on Afghanistan, and its second Iraq war.
Judith Goldman
Praise for DeathStar/rico-chet
It starts us ricocheting across gashed gushes of misinformation—abuses of tragedy hardly past—and ends on cashed plans for the accidental future; but this poetry’s trajectory is cocked to startle us out of the compulsory wake over and over. Fact and factitiousness, set into counter-docudramas gorgeous despite their revolt against their very substance, wrangle an archival arsenal out of present conditions. Colliding and courting illegibility, they co-conspire against the rhetorical flights of a fetter. Out of Deathstar games, this contrascrapbook’s starling architecture stockfiles each “blast/And blazEquotE” into concussive refrains, contradicting the hollowing effects of abounding poststructural citation as they bolster our outlook against the floating wreckage of “protection.”
— Jennifer Scappettone
In this violent and deeply accusatory book the cause and the effect are the restoration of our historical context as crime. The crime being murder. DeathStar/rico-chet: The canceled check of a civilization. Somehow I don’t think that Pound thought his investment in poetry as “news that stays new” would be returned for lack of funds. The implications of Goldman’s work are immense.
— Rod Smith
Like a Situationist armed with a Search Engine, Judith Goldman provides a homeopathic cure for a polis drowning in news feeds that starve instead of inform. Listen, O, Citizens!
— Charles Bernstein
From the opening salvo of “OSI RIP(?) c.2/19/02-c.2/26/06″—compiling shards of news related to the ill-fated U.S. Office of Strategic Influence (designed to influence public opinion in the Arab world)—the second book from Goldman (Vocoder) appropriates, parodies and transforms the writing and speech that surround the war on terror… Pitched to an era of shock and awe, this book rarely misses its target.
— Publishers Weekly