Reference ≠ Endorsement

Comprising six sequences of prose poetry exploring domestic objects - ’Bread’, ’Candles’, ’Bookshelves’, ’Plates’, ’Bedding’ and ’Dining Table’ - interwoven with reflective mini-essays, Reference ≠ Endorsement sets out to add to discussions about what constitutes archival practice. Mining quotidian items from fabrics and furniture to instruction manuals and product packaging, it presents an alternative archive of the everyday, documenting society and the dislocated selves consistently denied by ’official’ apparatuses. Inspired by writers including Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine and Jeff Hilson, it proposes a more blended, inclusive, organic approach to documentation in order to create new possibilities for the representation [re-presentation] of these selves.///'Reference ≠ Endorsement approaches what can only be described as a feminized machinery of thought-at once clinical yet intuitive, factual yet profoundly wounded. Here, womanhood are not merely lived but practised, unpractised, prescribed, and undone, rebuilt from fragments of suffering and archival dust. This is a mesmerising archival project that explores what is left behind when presence is removed, what accumulates in the silent folds of fabric, and what survives inside syntactic units that resemble prisons more than sentences. // A relentless and terrifyingly precise book, Reference ≠ Endorsement doesn’t seek lyricism but instead finds a devastating intimacy in the mechanics of ruin. It’s a wonderful collection designed to haunt, clink, and reverberate long after you turn the final page.'-- Ágnes Lehóczky'A J Moore’s playful linguistic experiments cut through layers of nostalgic myth and comfortable complacency to deconstruct such seeming innocuous objects as bread, candles, dinner plates and book shelves, both illuminating and as often satirising the powerful forces that encourage the consumption, conservatism and competitiveness that go into designing the domestic. Reference ≠ Endorsement once again confirms A J Moore as among my favourite poets.'-- Mark Lindsey'Reference ≠ Endorsement reframes domestic space through an intimate anti-archive of objects. Family history, feminist theory, and practice are intertextually intermingled with refreshing formal ingenuity in this collection as commentary on its own making is folded into the body of the poetic text.'-- JR Carpenter'A J Moore decrypts the signs and inscriptions of a hoard of forms, birth-, marriage-, death-certificates, letters, photographs, tracking the ways lives and bodies are subject to bureaucratized surveillance, biopowerful scripting, regulated governmentality of the matter of our kin. The prose poems rummage through the cardboard boxes of the family archive as though also acting as a bureau shaping the data doubles of the maternal and the paternal lines and lives, but also enact oblique and moving forms of elegy and recuperation. This is astonishing work, manifesting as a compelling and eloquent challenge to the archive in its miming of the regulator’s erasures, censorships and rationalities that brings difficult sympathies to bear upon these Sheffield working-class lives across the 19th and 20th century, in sickness and in health, in war and peace, through life and death, as family history and trace under the eyes of power.'-- Adam Piette