Reference ≠ Endorsement
A J Moore
forthcoming 2025
Comprising six sequences of prose poetry exploring domestic objects – ‘Bread’, ‘Candles’, ‘Bookshelves’, ‘Plates’, ‘Bedding’ and ‘Dining Table’ – interwoven with reflective mini-essays, Reference ≠ Endorsement sets out to add to discussions about what constitutes archival practice. Mining quotidian items from fabrics and furniture to instruction manuals and product packaging, it presents an alternative archive of the everyday, documenting society and the dislocated selves consistently denied by ‘official’ apparatuses. Inspired by writers including Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine and Jeff Hilson, it proposes a more blended, inclusive, organic approach to documentation in order to create new possibilities for the representation [re-presentation] of these selves.
///
“In a world where we're conditioned to seek neat narratives, Reference ≠ Endorsement delivers a necessary and visceral rupture. This collection of prose poems operates like a post-Benjaminian archive, meticulously shredding, dismantling, and reassembling the detritus of domestic life, memory, and the female body. Its syntax is physically broken, almost obsessive in its precision, creating suffocating, dizzying spacetime vacuums that spiral inward and outward—part exhibition, part confession, part cell.
Drawing from fragments of language found lurking in the digital ether—from interior design sites to medical equipment retailers—and focusing on the potent, often apologetic presence of everyday objects like bread, candles, and dining tables, this work explores how our most intimate possessions can signify belonging, unbelonging, and even act as means of liberation or control.
With the brutal, steel-toned language of conceptual poetics tempered by intimate, factual essays, Reference ≠ Endorsement approaches what can only be described as a feminized machinery of thought—at once clinical yet intuitive, factual yet profoundly wounded. Here, womanhood are not merely lived but practised, unpractised, prescribed, and undone, rebuilt from fragments of suffering and archival dust. This is a mesmerising archival project that explores what is left behind when presence is removed, what accumulates in the silent folds of fabric, and what survives inside syntactic units that resemble prisons more than sentences.
A relentless and terrifyingly precise book, Reference ≠ Endorsement doesn't seek lyricism but instead finds a devastating intimacy in the mechanics of ruin. It’s a wonderful collection designed to haunt, clink, and reverberate long after you turn the final page.”
-- Ágnes Lehóczky
“Reference ≠ Endorsement is an incisive, rich, poetic, intertextual scrutinising of the culture, history and politics behind the objects that quietly and sometimes sinisterly shape our lives. A J Moore’s playful linguistic experiments cut through layers of nostalgic myth and comfortable complacency to deconstruct such seeming innocuous objects as bread, candles, dinner plates and book shelves, both illuminating and as often satirising the powerful forces that encourage the consumption, conservatism and competitiveness that go into designing the domestic. Reference ≠ Endorsement once again confirms A J Moore as among my favourite poets.”
-- Mark Lindsey
ISBN: 978-1-916541-20-7
