Insert Coin by Joshua Zelesnick

Insert Coin is indelibly shaped by the atrocities committed by the United States during its interminable War on Terror while meditating on the structures that underlie that violence, including the cultural form of the video game. For all the seemingly disembodied virtuality of our digital lives, of the simulacral experience of what theorist McKenzie Wark calls gamespace—“I’m in a video / game and there’s no way out”—Joshua Zelesnick tirelessly attends to the material realities of what it means to be human in the infowhelm throughout this superb collection, to the bodies, feelings, affects, and images of those who have to navigate this space—which is also battlespace, dronespace. Page after page of Insert Coin confronts the fact that “constructing walls can’t defend us / from our tectonic heart,” and this collection’s remarkable, dense poems document some of the more difficult aspects of what it means to live on this late planet in this late year of late empire, this “strange electronic limbo, white / hot clarity of nightmare / in infrared, heat signatures / ghostly white against the cool black earth.” Zelesnick’s work also holds out poetry as an alternative to the eradicating quantification that defines so much of contemporary life, inviting us to hear and see and sing and feel some other space of play, a space against and beyond the violence of the digital, what we might call a poetryspace.

–Bradley J. Fest, author of 2013-2017: Sonnets (2024)

“Zelesnick’s language game places a jar not in Tennessee but to the wall(s): listens proper, listens the better to hear a prisoner’s voice; cracked shouts; grandmothers; children’s rhymes; tulips; a command, light em up; reported statistics then applause; some audience… These all come through and are formed in rough clay into this almost-story taking almost-place on a large empty plain, the figures and characters becoming, as we read, haunted and haunting.  Insert Coin is a fabulous, furious book.”

–Kate Northrop, author of Homewrecker (2022)

I found a narrow form of six-syllable lines and eight-line stanzas to reflect the six-foot by eight -foot cell solitary confinement prisoners are forced to live in. So begins Joshua Zelesnick‘s meticulous, terse, fearsome book, Insert Coin.  Extraordinary the way these poems unflinchingly confer their intelligence on suffering, burrowing deep into the dehumanized and dystopic:  the prisoner in the embassy/the prisoner in solitary/the prisoner with sleep-deprived/ eyes still pale as a suffocating/fish…the prisoner as a meme. Zelesnick’s poems arise out of the crises of the era, and they provide that era with a relentless, formidable critic.

–Lynn Emanuel, author of Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing (2023)