“[Fugue and Strike] hums and hollers with filth and eros, with the wasting heap of capitalism.”
— The Boston Globe

“In Fugue & Strike, poetry hovers spectrally above the infrastructures of the capitalist machine, laying bare its circuitry and potential oblivion. A missive smeared in excrement becomes a manifesto. Mutiny is declared against poetic form. Cops and scabs murder each other. In its close examination of the void between labor and commodity, pleasure and oblivion, Hall’s terrifying and often hilarious book envisions ‘a space of public salvage,’ a global common that stretches from Buffalo to Ithaca, to the world. These poems will make you want to strike, fight back, and leave a burning bag of shit on your boss’s doorstep—and for that, we need them. Joe Hall is one of the greatest poets we have.”
— Marty Cain, author of The Prelude

“In the thick of an endless fight for liveable life, Hall presents parallel wastages—both the people made into waste by state and socioeconomic violence, and the excess objects, fragments, sites, and molecules generated by the same violence. The fugue of navigating a breathlessly gentrified, financialized city space leads to a time-hopping study of garbage handlers’ strikes. Words fail, action arises, and somehow, along with it, hope. Any reader sharing this fugue/strike might say, ‘I felt the tip of something I could not see in me that trembles,’ and know that it is not just fear.”
— Jay Besemer, author of Theories of Performance