PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE (2010)
“Almost impossibly grand in scope Pigafetta Is My Wife is a rare achievement and quite a debut. Hall’s poetry crosses contemporary love and ancient epic, folding inward and out by motion derivative of the sestina and pantoum, so that whether via image or address, beautiful shards fall: ‘A chrysanthemum blossom sails across a bowl of milk.’ Emotion accretes in accordance with ambition. A treatise on the action of discovery, this is a book to be taken in whole.” —Sally Keith
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REVIEWS
Colorado Review – by Jason Labbe
Cow Heavy Books – by Ryan Call
Sycamore Review – by David Blomenburg
THE CONTAINER STORE (2012)
Joe Hall and Chad Hardy’s The Container Store explores the construction, implementation, and erosion of economic and social authority, commodity, and corporeality. As both found and original language moves from domestic space to city, office-scape, and borderland (economic, political, bodily), it examines the (lack of) agency that the individual has in a world flooded with borders, bodies, commodities, contracts, and fragment. The work that Hall and Hardy undertake here is reminiscent of 20th century experimental movements such as Situationism, Futurism, and Dada, as well as 21st century net art like that of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. It is a mash up of high art and the profane, a typographical assault. The book itself is an enactment of the very spectacle that it reveals. –SpringGun Press
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REVIEW
THE DEVOTIONAL POEMS (2013)
“This is a book with a basic religion, which shifts and turns its shade upon looking, drawing its colors from The Book of Revelation as much as from the kinder spirit books. It is a sacred text where Hall becomes the ‘singing corpse,’ not ‘dragged across this landscape,’ but instead the singing thing dancing across the hills and valley.” —Dorothea Lasky
Cover adapted from Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz’ Awake, Sleeper.
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REVIEWS
JOE HALL 