Harold Jaffe

Harold Jaffe was among the most admired and versatile writers in the US for several decades, having written fiction, non-fiction, "docufiction," drama, and now, in The Infected Desert, what he called documentary poems. His subject is the Israeli war on the Palestinians which Jaffe addresses both through brief, tensely discerning free verse poems and actual documents which he reconstitutes so that the subtexts are revealed. Despite the cruel and maddening suppression of truth-telling about the war that is pervasive in the US, Jaffe had the courage to break through in order to do what documentary poems must do: "Tell truth to power."

Harold Jaffe is a master of the disembodied voice. These fictions-transgressive, political, dryly comic-are grounded in an ancient tradition, that of the speech of the storyteller. Interlocutors talk as if out of dark caves, and the result is a marvel of conversation that takes the reader to places somehow beyond the "real world," only to comment, often searingly, upon its absurdities.

How much dexterity does a writer need to write a "story" in a single sentence? In their virtuosic collection, brevity masters Harold Jaffe and Tom Whalen, drawing from a host of injustices currently at play on our teetering earth, meet this challenge with a variety of formal strategies: prose poems, micro-fictions, creation myths, pens es, headlines, fables, fragments, quotations, and graffiti. With its nuanced, often antiphonal structure, readers of Single-Sentence Stories will be engaged, entertained and informed by this unique collaboration.

BRUT is a collection of creative essays on contemporary art and artists.

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda. Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.

Exploring dangerous territory, Jafee uses illustrations, letters, monologues, interviews, and "unsituated dialogues" to bring to life some of the most infamous serial killers of all time.

A veteran writer creates innovative fiction out of real newspaper articles; The articles are mostly typical American fare: a high school mass murder; accusations of sexual molestation; the suicide of a rock star; policing pornography on the internet; another serial killer on the loose... Harold Jaffe enters the article, and by various stratagems exposes the host text's latent biases, in the process teasing out its most fertile (that is to say, terrorist) subtexts. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic text is released into culture to do its dirty work. Jaffe's treatment of these grotesque - though increasingly commonplace - subjects is ambitious and sly. Often he covers back over his story with a new version, much like a raccoon eluding a pack of hounds. In ""Glendale Palmdale"" unsettling gender reversal in the twice-told tale of a roadside attack is juxtaposed with the well-known story of the schoolteacher impregnated by her student. ""Faux"" interweaves the story of a botched amputation and a report of faux patients who check up on hospital bedside manners, and then abruptly segues into a chatroom entrapment article. At times characters from one piece infect another, thus pointing to the chaotic breakdown of civilized boundaries, already active in the original articles and dramatized by Jaffe's seizures of them. These conversational retellings of news stories further underscore our cultural acclimation to the preposterous.