A sardonic burlesque with "the intransigence of the femme," Pain Survey plumbs queer desire and strips American necropolitics down. Both a cross-examination of a global war economy and a celebration creaturely belonging, the book collates the stuff of daily casual hells nested in their denial while insisting that shrapnel wounds can be healed as "metal works its way out".
In lyric reportage from across Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut, and New York City, the book finds the ghosts of other imperial exploits haunting this century's "forever wars". From tombstones turned ballistic weapons in Britain's defeat of the Spanish Armada to the stock market mourning the death of George Bush Sr. during Donald Trump's Islamophobic presidency, Pain Survey wrests arresting details from the numbing excess of America's supersized hegemony to indict both the pain produced and its whitewashing optics. It spoofs global capital's relentless replication of its viral avatars while repping its predations as prowess: "Exchange rate porn: as their currency slides rapidly downward / against our very strong dollar. Here come the villas filching water".
Against sanitized myths, the book proposes "actually approaching the witness box, the witness / a funnel of fire with a human body at the center. Ask her / What is considered a liberating garment. Why / are there so many paintings of white women looking down". In its "infinite stare-down between hope and dread", it's death wish versus queer glee. Lingering in fugitive communion offered across differences and borders, Pain Survey writes into song the belief that "if we keep searching we can find the balm we need".
Gathering the discrete into a fierce, piercing, and exuberant whole, Pain Survey invites the reader to find kinship with doves nesting in pockets formed by shelling and homesick and captive crocodiles' refusal to participate in gladiator contests, to get "plump with joy" even in precarity so as to imagine: "In my paradise/there would be a lot of liquids and could I bask/unabashed in the breathing."
