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the archive is all in present tense
THE ARCHIVE IS ALL IN PRESENT TENSE attempts to capture the feeling of archival research, which, despite being an attempt to access information about the past, has a way of infusing the present; research unfolds in real time as you touch and handle objects that radiate with presence. In the archive we follow a researcher who is exploring a fantastical, limitless archive and though she attempts to research the history of war crimes, she keeps encountering objects from her personal past and memory. Ultimately, it explores both the falling in love with big institutions of learning (libraries, archives, museums) and the exhilaration of discovery, but also the ways these institutions violently exclude and how to reconcile that love with the past wrongs these institutions have committed. THE ARCHIVE IS ALL IN PRESENT TENSE is an intensely cinematic collection of poems, intensely erotic and equally cerebral, where you will descend into archival folds making the body negative space in a restless, inescapable, eternal now. To write is to rewrite with alphabets of the past, surging into the present, being remade, where the self is both trapped and sublime. In Elizabeth Hoover's bewitching, tightly-focused poems, we fight to surface, we are breathless, are material culture, are object-subjects, we observe our own archivals as we are 'made to be made / Victory / Empire / Change.'"--Sun-Yung Shin "THE ARCHIVE IS ALL IN PRESENT TENSE works like a preservationist who leaves breadcrumbs for the generations that follow, so they'll understand what was vital and what will continue to be vital for their time. Both the inventiveness of the conceit and the urgency in the content are incredibly compelling, and the language on these lines holds the passion of the present progressive. Sit down, put on your white gloves, and explore!"--A. Van Jordan "Step into this mysterious, sumptuous, and scintillating dream archive that is all at once refuge, spectacle, reverie, cabaret, and labyrinth. In these remarkable poems, Elizabeth Hoover transforms the archive into a wonderland and sensorium, not through catalogued evidence but through wild and joyful invention. In elegiac and maximalist poems that interweave and echo back, the archive becomes a metamorphizing a music box, a kissing booth, an identity. With great lyric verve, Hoover explores institutional negligence, slippages and spillages around categorization, and how we can perhaps forgive ourselves for needing categorization. In this astonishingly beautiful debut collection, Hoover shows us that the archive is ultimately a supreme act of the imagination."--Catherine Bowman Poetry.
- GenresPoetry
74 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 2022
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32 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Hoover
1 book1 followerElizabeth Hoover (she/her) is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is an assistant professor at Webster University, where she teaches such classes as LGBTQ+ Literature, Genderqueer Frankenstein, and Archival Poetics.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 1, 2024
In this startling imaginative feat we enter a world of strangeness that is familiar but otherly. We experience memory and imagination as enacted in the present through the labyrinth of historical, personal, familial, national research and recollection. Part aquarium, where we swim or memories swim before us, the central symbol, at times almost primeval, captures the disorientating effects of our own or others’ memories; also part taxidermy collection and workshop, figures and memories are held in distorted or tortured poses.
The poet’s visits are framed by cards that are part accession slips, part research, part request for information, and each directs into unexpected classifications. Peopled by ghostly figures who suddenly become ordinary, the narrator feels an outsider, emphasised by the language of the archive: formal, disciplined, even suppressed; as in memory, and history, in the plethora of detail and experience, we feel something remains remote, that something is being kept from us. So each card leads us down increasingly strange and unexpected avenues, often into worlds of sexuality.
The imaginative concept is brilliant and addresses the nature of how we are compelled to experience the past, and how we seek answers, about our own and others’ identities, within society’s expectations, and the struggle to be true to ourselves. Family dynamics play a key part, with the coercion of siblings and troubling historical relatives played out against sexual identity. The recurrence of certain phrases in the research looms out in a disturbing mystery of family myth.
The narrator feels an outsider, in what seems at times a setting where one can become easily lost.
All of this is not to overlook the sustained elegance of the writing, as we move section by section through family history, personal struggle, in a symbolic environment that conjures our efforts to know ourselves, who we are, how we are made to feel we do or do not fit in; how we come to terms with the weight of history as it bears down upon us, relived in the mind, in the present, its pain unhealed.
The originality of its concept, the exact placement of memory within a language both guarded and revealing, are captivating. In our search for meaning we may have no control over the caprices, the torments, the mystery of memory, but this collection portrays with beautifully poised accuracy the struggle to assert the will and the drive towards self discovery as inspirational, with the archive of language itself to help us, through the agency of poetry: as conversation with ourselves, our histories, our memories, as part of the universal struggle to understand our identity and place in the world. As such the archive can be an overwhelming labyrinthine experience. This collection navigates its complexities towards self recognition with candour, wry humour, and honesty.
The opening poem lists some of the identities of the archive: oracle, music box, dentist chair, and a place of wanton cruelty. This sets up a complex tone upon which the collection elaborates. The whirl of memory is evoked brilliantly where the researcher is constantly distracted by other thoughts, emotional or sexual.
Through the archive, from poem to poem, we are constantly unsettled, failing to arrive where we thought, as in the taxidermy collection. In its potent symbolism we encounter the sorrowful vestiges of dead creatures, held in a kind of limbo, that suddenly raise questions about family history, disturbing and inescapable.
Throughout the collection the technique is assured and accomplished, suddenly presenting a pressing memory or thought. This is immensely effective against the background of natural landscapes, the settings against which memory plays out. The image of the archive’s papers as falling snow demonstrates this poet’s ability to draw out a complexity with great clarity. This captivating image contains an inherent conflict: snow, ephemeral, unsustainable, while the letters and papers are hard copy of lives, filed away, but, like snow, incapable of being grasped or fully understood.
We shift between the personal and the universal, natural and human: stories half told, implied, gleaned. The final poems find the narrator herself transformed, placed in the archive, aware of nature’s fragility in a series of images, yearning and retrospective, that face with courage the final memory, that of our own fate. And as we experience this journey of research, of self discovery, of facing the past, with every page we too are transformed.
Review by Mick Evans, Poetry Book Awards 2024
The poet’s visits are framed by cards that are part accession slips, part research, part request for information, and each directs into unexpected classifications. Peopled by ghostly figures who suddenly become ordinary, the narrator feels an outsider, emphasised by the language of the archive: formal, disciplined, even suppressed; as in memory, and history, in the plethora of detail and experience, we feel something remains remote, that something is being kept from us. So each card leads us down increasingly strange and unexpected avenues, often into worlds of sexuality.
The imaginative concept is brilliant and addresses the nature of how we are compelled to experience the past, and how we seek answers, about our own and others’ identities, within society’s expectations, and the struggle to be true to ourselves. Family dynamics play a key part, with the coercion of siblings and troubling historical relatives played out against sexual identity. The recurrence of certain phrases in the research looms out in a disturbing mystery of family myth.
The narrator feels an outsider, in what seems at times a setting where one can become easily lost.
All of this is not to overlook the sustained elegance of the writing, as we move section by section through family history, personal struggle, in a symbolic environment that conjures our efforts to know ourselves, who we are, how we are made to feel we do or do not fit in; how we come to terms with the weight of history as it bears down upon us, relived in the mind, in the present, its pain unhealed.
The originality of its concept, the exact placement of memory within a language both guarded and revealing, are captivating. In our search for meaning we may have no control over the caprices, the torments, the mystery of memory, but this collection portrays with beautifully poised accuracy the struggle to assert the will and the drive towards self discovery as inspirational, with the archive of language itself to help us, through the agency of poetry: as conversation with ourselves, our histories, our memories, as part of the universal struggle to understand our identity and place in the world. As such the archive can be an overwhelming labyrinthine experience. This collection navigates its complexities towards self recognition with candour, wry humour, and honesty.
The opening poem lists some of the identities of the archive: oracle, music box, dentist chair, and a place of wanton cruelty. This sets up a complex tone upon which the collection elaborates. The whirl of memory is evoked brilliantly where the researcher is constantly distracted by other thoughts, emotional or sexual.
Through the archive, from poem to poem, we are constantly unsettled, failing to arrive where we thought, as in the taxidermy collection. In its potent symbolism we encounter the sorrowful vestiges of dead creatures, held in a kind of limbo, that suddenly raise questions about family history, disturbing and inescapable.
Throughout the collection the technique is assured and accomplished, suddenly presenting a pressing memory or thought. This is immensely effective against the background of natural landscapes, the settings against which memory plays out. The image of the archive’s papers as falling snow demonstrates this poet’s ability to draw out a complexity with great clarity. This captivating image contains an inherent conflict: snow, ephemeral, unsustainable, while the letters and papers are hard copy of lives, filed away, but, like snow, incapable of being grasped or fully understood.
We shift between the personal and the universal, natural and human: stories half told, implied, gleaned. The final poems find the narrator herself transformed, placed in the archive, aware of nature’s fragility in a series of images, yearning and retrospective, that face with courage the final memory, that of our own fate. And as we experience this journey of research, of self discovery, of facing the past, with every page we too are transformed.
Review by Mick Evans, Poetry Book Awards 2024
January 11, 2024
I bought this after hearing some of the poems read by the author, and that was a wise move.
This is the kind of project that is difficult to explain one's reaction to. This very much worked for me, but uses approaches that often fail to keep my attention. I'm going to have to think about that in detail.
The theme/metaphor of an archive is the obvious attraction for a library rat like myself. Archives are the center of the important Universe, so I'm all ready to hear about an actual archive, as well as being open to archive-as-metaphor. Both are here.
The use of archive/library subject cards as a form of graphic poetry (The titles begin "Card Catalog Entry:") is mildly brilliant. They can be very specific, but the "see also"s and the "narrower term"s often slip into surrealism or unexpected association of ideas. They appear to enhance some specific adjacent poems, but that's not entirely clear.
There are also poems that are bits of plays, prose poems, mixed poems - nicely experimental. Are all the poems clear and accessible? Um, no. There are allusions whose specifics we cannot know, but whose weight we can feel - part of poetry's ability to speak about what cannot be said in the open. That is a thing that often misfires for me, but in this case it did not make the poems meaningless for the reader.
Favorite lines:
from "the archive tells you you are in the wrong war"
Once, the only god I had was my sister
and like every god she turned away. ...
from "Found in Collection"
we weren't blessed or cared for kept
in proper storage humidity controlled
we weren't polished oiled protected
from sunlight moisture thieves neighbors camp counselors
we were never found or rescued unless
we were found and rescued written
into a scholar's list of discoveries
we were never exiled and allowed to return
welcomed home after injustice revealed
we were never clever when faced
with an impossible choice
we never kept a cool head in an emergency or
came up with an ingenious solution to an intractable
problem
Yes, this is one interesting project. Recommended.
My one correction: I'm pretty sure that "clamoring" on page 25 is meant to be "clambering" (fourth stanza).
This is the kind of project that is difficult to explain one's reaction to. This very much worked for me, but uses approaches that often fail to keep my attention. I'm going to have to think about that in detail.
The theme/metaphor of an archive is the obvious attraction for a library rat like myself. Archives are the center of the important Universe, so I'm all ready to hear about an actual archive, as well as being open to archive-as-metaphor. Both are here.
The use of archive/library subject cards as a form of graphic poetry (The titles begin "Card Catalog Entry:") is mildly brilliant. They can be very specific, but the "see also"s and the "narrower term"s often slip into surrealism or unexpected association of ideas. They appear to enhance some specific adjacent poems, but that's not entirely clear.
There are also poems that are bits of plays, prose poems, mixed poems - nicely experimental. Are all the poems clear and accessible? Um, no. There are allusions whose specifics we cannot know, but whose weight we can feel - part of poetry's ability to speak about what cannot be said in the open. That is a thing that often misfires for me, but in this case it did not make the poems meaningless for the reader.
Favorite lines:
from "the archive tells you you are in the wrong war"
Once, the only god I had was my sister
and like every god she turned away. ...
from "Found in Collection"
we weren't blessed or cared for kept
in proper storage humidity controlled
we weren't polished oiled protected
from sunlight moisture thieves neighbors camp counselors
we were never found or rescued unless
we were found and rescued written
into a scholar's list of discoveries
we were never exiled and allowed to return
welcomed home after injustice revealed
we were never clever when faced
with an impossible choice
we never kept a cool head in an emergency or
came up with an ingenious solution to an intractable
problem
Yes, this is one interesting project. Recommended.
My one correction: I'm pretty sure that "clamoring" on page 25 is meant to be "clambering" (fourth stanza).
July 4, 2023
I love a high concept, almost universally, and I especially love them in a poetry collection. These poems take you into a fantastical archive that holds all the ephemera of so many lifetimes, and the librarians urge you to follow the rules and the archivist themself is quite sexy. I just loved this so much.
April 9, 2024
I loved the way that (and I am going to use the wrong words, but) the different formats of poems created a cadence and rhythm to the book -- poems punctuated by archival notes, long stanzas, short bursts of paired lines, paragraphs of words.
April 5, 2024
I mean, I wrote it, so....
July 26, 2025
SUCH an imaginative and complex and multi-layered poetry book/ archive /multi-disciplinary project. Completely gorgeous.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews