Wung chan e: The Preparations 1-7 - Calum Hazell

“Calum Hazell is at once technician and thaumaturge, a poet whose hyper-precise bevels and chamfers of language attain to the intangibly marvellous. At first glance, Wung chan e offers up some of the most punishingly reticulated poetry out there. Hazell seems to speed up poetry, to make it more efficient—here replacing anthropic poetic lines with an automated grid of virgules; there imbuing discursive registers with a machinic auctoritas. But this bleeding edge poetry is neither Futurism redux nor Accelerationism manqué. Neither is it a receptacle for the merely miraculous. Always, something familiarly warm and messy teems beneath the numinous chrome edifice, asking to be engaged with. Approached generously, Wung chan e is itself generous, liberating words from the citadels of sentiment in which they so often immured. A thrilling and vertiginous reminder that human language, at its root, is pliant, surprising, material.”  Colin Lee Marshall