Jill Maji's Labor (Nightboat, 2012)

Jill Magi describes her book LABOR (Nightboat, 2012) as "A fiction ... / An installation / A handmade employee handbook." But, of course, it's also A Poetry. Read more about LABOR, and see more images of the author's text and text-work on Magi's site, here.

Find excerpted poems from LABOR at jubilat, here; and at The Brooklyn Rail, here. Read reviews at CSU's Center for Literary Publishing, here; at Tupelo Quarterly, here; and at Drunken Boat, here.

In an interview with Andy Fitch, Magi explains how, when drawing from source texts, such as those she found at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (a public archive at NYU's Bobst Library), "[T]he words are openings into, portals into something generative, a story about to come." 

still from LABOR: Finding Guide

LABOR is a physical, not merely intellectual work; Magi reminds us, "I actually made boxes, lined them with fake fur, and put documents in them while I was writing LABOR."
 
Even more: view Magi's LABOR: Finding Guide on YouTube; read her curated chapbook Labor Poetic Labor! (Essay Press), online here; and, be sure to check out Magi's series on Textile Poetics at Jacket2.

 

A mixed-media miniature from Karen Green's "Tiny Stampede," here. Green explains, "I've been making this "found poetry" for years. I thought I invented it, but found out later I most definitely did not. Some of these are taken from a poetry anthology--I cut out just the first lines and spent an afternoon or two rearranging them. Then I got into a trance and cut those up and rearranged those. Trances are hard to come by these days; I am happy for those hours. And yes, "to give sorrow words", sneakily, using the words of others who tried to do the same," in an interview here (and also here).

Green's forthcoming book including similar visual/poetic work Bough Down (Siglio Press 2013), is an "unusual narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with miniature collages." Some discussion of Bough Down here. See/read some images and excerpts here, here and here. More with Green here and here, a previous publication, Here/Gone (2008), here.