Joey Yearous-Algozin, Holly Melgard’s Friends & Family, Bon Aire Projects, 2014.
For three years, Joey Yearous-Algozin transcribed Holly
Melgard’s voicemails.
in a new mode of um exquisite equivocation between a lover’s
devotion and his exploitation, between his attention and his appropriation,
between his care and his um violation, Holly Melgard’s Friends &
Family archives Joey Yearous-Algozin’s verbatim transcription of three
years of voicemail addressed to his partner Holly Melgard catching hold of the
ultimate ephemera, this brilliant, uh compulsively readable act of medium
translation is also a virtuosic performance of genre-bending, as HMFF
runs the gamut of conceptualism, confessional um lyric, documentary,
life-writing, novella… 21C kin to Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, Yearous-Algozin’s work torques that model by not ventriloquizing
Ms. Melgard directly but instead uh uh uncannily channeling callers who contour
her absence in the age of SMS and email, the voice message has its own place
in the ecology of immediacy and too closeness HMFF not only flaunts
its intimacy (so who um authorized this?) but tenderly weaponizes it, the reader
entrapped as solicited eavesdropper in an all-too-uh-uh-familiar contemporary
circuit of oversharing, as those in-network and the Hollys they apostrophize are
dispossessed and given up to exposure the book’s genius lies most uh evidently
in this cast of characters and the composite portrait they create: bots who
oblige Melgard as consumer-debtor (and as patient) to service her service
relations; friends in her web of reciprocity at home in Buffalo; friends far
flung who find Melgard um elusive but love her dearly; and, centrally, her
nuclear family, who continually summon her as anchor of their affective economy
as HMFF amply and movingly documents white, working class precarity,
Melgard’s own complex class affinities and more especially her affective labor
as daughter are brought into relief at times fiscally but always affectively,
Melgard is called on, called up to absorb a continuous string of micro-
and macro-crises even as she is also positioned as receptacle of excess love
if Yearous-Algozin’s own voice joins these market forces of desire and need –
“sorry for being a grumplestiltskin give me a call ok I love you” – his book
knows it does not just represent but is itself inserted into that economy of
affect thus perhaps the flipside of HMFF’s um macho propriety over
Melgard’s messages, its gendered debasement of the love object in abject
disclosure, is Yearous-Algozin’s over-identification with his lover and
perhaps such listening to and (word-) processing of all that she has heard
enacts a therapeutic commoning and lessening of its burdens to respond to that
FAQ: I don’t think um you don’t need to change your plan to get Holly
Melgard’s Friends & Family but um I don’t know if uh uh this means it
won’t change you. — Judith Goldman
Trisha Low: Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Joey Yearous-Algozin
Joey Yearous-Algozin is the author of The Lazarus Project (TROLL THREAD, GaussPDF), Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family
(Bon Aire Projects) and Caller (Company Books, Spring
2016), among others. He co-edits TROLL THREAD with Holly
Melgard and Chris Sylvester. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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