Alex Turgeon: 5 Condos

Alex Turgeon’s typewritten poems use the generative value of number 5 as a formal constraint. Each of the five urban landscapes repeats a phrase that calls to action and tests the fecundity of repetition and seriality. Memorize this city of hearts, Misadvice this city of narcs, Martyrize this city of tarts… Drawing together queer theory and concrete poetry, Turgeon understands the constructive condition of language and the poetic space of architecture in relation to the management of bodies. It is precisely the concrete and diagrammatic nature of the poems that distances them from their supposed coldness and opens them up to a variation that incorporates emotional and political states.