19/09/2025
We’re officially releasing Eight Memoranda by Michael Begnal! $10, including shipping. Link in comment.
Eight Memoranda explores the position of the text within an ever-corporatizing world. The poems begin with a merger of body and nature, with the text acting as a communication of this relationship. But soon a separation enters the field. Persons are sorted into class, shifting all things to indicators of this status. After text becomes commodified, non-commercialism becomes a privilege. Text could be obscured so far that it even erases humanity through commerce and isolation; or it could be an impetus to the social through shared knowledge. This social drive returns the poems to nature and demands the reader awaken back to the world.
Michael Begnal is author of the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016), and a critical monograph The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022), with a second Stooges book forthcoming from Reaktion Books.
This book was laser printed as an incunable book, referring back to the earliest stage of printed books assembled with the text only on the recto side. It was hand in Saint Francis, WI, in an edition of 50.
