Black Box Syndrome [Paperback]

Poems that follow systems of chance and divination to counter corrosive financial systems.
 
Jose-Luis Moctezuma’sBlack Box Syndromeis a series of poems—or “black boxes”—based on black hexagrams in theI Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, these poems cast their lenses on the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the “influencing machine,”Black Box Syndromeexplores tensions between lyric excess and digital compaction in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.Jose-Luis Moctezumais a Xicano poet based in Chicago. He is the author of a chapbook,Spring Tlaloc Seance, and the bookPlace-Discipline, also published by Omnidawn. His poetry and criticism have appeared inPostmodern Culture,Fence,Jacket2,Chicago Review,Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere.