Dan Farrell
Last Instance
ISBN 1-928650-01-5
$9.00
61 pages

"He sees more than I. The Language experiments of Finnegans Wake and All that Fall have led Dan Farrell's stripped-down model of composition and evocation. In the gnomic, halting lines, misspoke syllables, lost vowels of Last Instance, a transactional writing hobbles triumphant to the finish line. Farrell can write through the old ice of the machine-driven no-future Mordor and the ultimate tendresses of love and age. As usual, Elton John said it first: Daniel, you're the star in the face of the sky."

--Kevin Killian

"To veteran Farrell-watchers and novices alike, Last Instance inculcates like only a computer virus can, deeply, subtlety and strikes, as the cliché goes, without warning. If he is the hacker, what is the institution, nothing less than the motherboard between your ears. That's right, our collective scrambled noodle à la Free Traders, Good Neighbors, Managed Care, Church, State and whatever separates them. When the strange yet familiar noises coming from these Home Offices and their retail clinics (even from our own mouths, ma!) called words, can't make sense or keep up with the interest rate, then it's time to heave the pile of bills (and the language they're written on) back to the sender. Let us agree, Last Instance argues, that Ideology is the thought that put us and accompany us to sleep (in the full sarcastic sense) i.e. the auto-representative. Can't we then agree there exists a great dialectic gulf between the IPO-happy venture capitalist and the 'anxious,' 'worried,' 'irritated' borderliner we've all become. The latter historical psyche for Farrell seems a much better start to revolutionize our scattered identities."

--Hung Q. Tu

"In his Last Instance, Dan Farrell poses the relations between social reproduction and expression through stuttering, mocking, and sutured acts of composition. His poetic strategies clash and mingle with the social instigating transpositions at the level of the letter, syntactical order, and semantic sensibility. Rather than hailing the ruse of subjective plenitude and unfettered expressivity, his compositions rely on perlocutionary acts engaging language in its nonreferential capacity to illicit and provoke action and response. Last Instance is written out of the intersection between the utterance of the small subject caught in immense institutional logics such as the calendar year, psychiatric diagnostics, historical time, and norms of interpersonal etiquette and rapport. Through his attention to the utterance, Farrell generates compositional methods for gathering experiential evidence. He arranges this material in order to historically locate and disclose forms of affectivity productive of, and generated by, systemic exclusions. It is at the site of the utterance that Farrell investigates the lived consequences of determining conditions which while organizing polity, hold the potential to disrupt the absorptive capacities and proliferating logics of late capital and neoliberalism. In Last Instance, these affective residues operate as materialitycreating a textual modality which according to Farrell is not a recovery of materiality for materiality's sake. This is a struggle over value, and use, and use-value because he adds, social relations, often in the form of values, pass through materiality while values surface through the operations of the material realm."

--Nancy Shaw

Born in Fort William, Ontario in 1963 and grew up in BC, Dan Farrell is the author of ape (1988) and Thinking of You (1994), both from Tsunami Press and (Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization by R. Buckminster Fuller, pp. 1-50) Grid (Meow Press, 1999). His work can also be found in the forthcoming anthology Writing Class: Documents from the Kootenay School of Writing (New Star). The Inkblot Record was published by Coach House Press. Dan is living in Brooklyn, NY and works as a proofreader of electronic financial data.