Unsub

Recasting the forensic and everyday language of the FBIs descriptions of unidentified subjects from suspects to criminals to corpses UNSUB probes what it is to be wanted. It explores our desire to have and to hold in contempt those subjects that threaten a society of securitization. Investigating a culture of terrorism paranoia and surveillance by rendering a world divided into victims and perpetrators UNSUB plays on the differences between catching a predator and being a catch. Through ghostly descriptions of live bodies the book scrutinizes the vicissitudes of anonymity and subjectivity indistinction and identity. By turning the forensic onto the forensic Divya Victor splays the bodies of those wanted into bits of want: soldered-over scars and moulding desires that glut of gut tissue and the rotting tongues ability to speak another tongue. To UNSUB is not as turns out to unsubjectify but to subjectify too highly. High as how meat goes when left too long by the side of the road. Like a graveyard the poems make a more permanent point than its peoples: What we want is enough. And always too much.-Vanessa Place This is a work under the auspices of resemblances the unknown subject the step just beyond or under. In Atom Egoyans Next of Kin hoards of narrative are sapped into wasp facial features. In UNSUB Divya Victor shows us how these narratives get charged by ethnicity a place a thievery and a poverty of emigrations migrations now virtual. We are fluttered by identifiers yes we are leaving us still too often facing losses. I just checked poetry is still alive.-Ara Shirinyan