Shearsman Books

Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700530

While ostensibly documenting a European vacation, Holiday interrogates historical narratives and artistic representations, examining patriarchal and nepotistic political and religious connections that are repackaged into the souvenir experience. From stripped reportage to dream fragments, Holiday positions the "traveller" in a hyperconscious lens that undermines conventional notions about the meaning of a holiday. Beneath the careful recording of art, food, and guidebooks' “most visited sites” are reverberations of war and power exposing the traveller's consumer culpability and the role of choice in demarcating and memorializing personal and historical trajectories.

"The poems in Holiday are not at ease. This is not a daybook of observations of another culture, but an anxious interrogation of what it means to be an individual (tourist) participating in one of the world's largest industries. The inherent privilege is complicated by the work's own unorthodoxy of language and ominous turns: “land excites you / but pictures develop as bleeding colors”—and if we turn our attention up from the tennis courts we'll see a vulture disturbing the air. The narrator of these poems looks for associations and when there aren't any she doesn't invent them. This is not a commodity."
—Stacy Szymaszek

"Jennifer Firestone's Holiday makes big sense to me. It make me think largely about why I like anyone's writing – and sometimes it's as simple as this: I like its physicality. I like its jumps. Holiday is extremely private, extremely active. It's notebooky in the best sense of the word because I feel privileged to get these fractured views of how Jennifer Firestone moves around the world. Her style at times is telegraphic (and insatiable) like Ginsberg. Let me say Gail Scott and Ginsberg. Also why do we bother reading. Why do we want to trail around in anyone's else's mind at all. Jennifer asks:

"Is it worth
going down these steps
are the bottom rooms worth it?

I say yeah. Enthusiastically yes."
—Eileen Myles

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