New Work by Tung-Hui Hu at "Absent"

Tung-Hui Hu

A MANIFESTO IS AN INVOICE

Parachute silk, iron ore, gasoline, exclamation marks—we used them to exclaim about the men that were rationed, too.With two women for every man, each allotted cards, the youngest, most fertile, first, we spoke shyly, our eyes flashing, when hearing the words manpower, manhunts, mandates, manifestoes.

The function of a manifesto is to name names, to decide who’s in and who’s out, who’s arrived and who’s late to the party. Packaged in the relentless emotion of a PowerPoint presentation, literary manifestoes are concerned with logistics, with product, with time to delivery. They are meant for upwardly mobile people diagramming their network of influence. They speak to the middle managers of poetry, third-tier literary magazines, people “in the know”: they are the ultimate back-office solution.

Read the entire piece here:
http://absentmag.org/?p=8