Light Stain, 2015
book, 95 pages, color.
purchase
"Magic Kingdom, Disney World FL" 2014
Light Stain is Pool's first book in print. Alien She, an ebook dedicated to Mark Aguhar and featuring David Geer and Colin Self, was released by Klaus eBooks in 2013. Brian Droitcour, the book's editor, noted Pool's writing for its "uneven syntax, with figures and events pivoting mid-line and slipping out of definition. Subjects don't stay still; "it" becomes "she" and vice versa as the uncertainty and instability of a body's presence in space acquires a bodily presence of its own."
Light Stain is limited to 150 numbered copies and is the first in What Pipeline's Detroit Artist Book series, funded in part by The Knight Foundation
Praise for Light Stain:
Isaac Pool is an imagist poet of gross Americana - mall textures, bad food, landfill things, website text. I think Light Stain is about being poor, being gay, and noticing things. And it's full of one of my favorite phenomena: the surprising tenderness of the totally alienated.
- Johanna Fateman
In Isaac Pool's sculptural works, one encounters a series of quasi-figures that are abject but also extremely funny. Such works (for lack of a better term) conjure awkward forms of presence, subtly echoing a landscape and idiom of post-disaster capitalism Detroit where he is from, but also of a queer habitus after the Internet. The poems in this book provide an integral context for Pool's aesthetic practices. Navigating familiar institutional and social spaces, they tell a story of the promethean courage by which one transcends their class origins while remaining faithful to their cultural background. Forms of life are mediated by objects (the photographs collected in the book show us this). There is a numinousness about objects and of private spaces that seem as disposable as they do otherworldly (light stains?).
- Thom Donovan
"Hollywood Studios, Disney World FL" 2014
"Cat Show, Gibraltor Trade Center, Clinton Township MI" 2008
Interview
That airs unctuous
Psychic or galloping
With the unisex esthetician
It behooves me to be good
Polish only delivers
Doesn't deposit
Can't make the paycheck stick
Can't swing the look that labors serious
For me to invest — say, caring:
A necessary and relaxed bath
With cloudy water, bubbles, sand
Can't say I won't get foot forward
Can't say I won't leave without
stubbed toe
I am launder and press
I am slouching trying starch
Whites are a public problem, you
Can never be responsible enough
And expectation falling
Like stunt double into pillows
Wanting camera to keep the risk dignified
I'm coming with material with proof
As if the thing wasn't a thing itself
As if it were a tether to make projection static
A staff to render wanting whole
"Home, Eastpointe MI" c. 1999-2002
"Mom's room" c. 2000 - 2002
"Hotel, Chicago IL" 2008
"Hotel near Metro Airport, Romulus MI" 2012
Dad not Daddy or Beard Jokes or
Stop laughing
We're all going to jail
In the box
Just for men
Dyed yellow blond
At 45 to look 35
He's grey
He's 32
He's straight
Legible brain
Dad decks common health
Coming out again
Ammonia wafts
The smell of responsibility
Who changed it last
Stifled in the mist of
Amalgamated content
The patience now not caring:
Blame forward the intro to lean
Paying for it the faded sheen
Waiting avoided a novel vaccine
Ummm
Skyline shifts in tiers of white fog
Missing dad's full face
Just an outline of the Empire State
Predictive color scheme for the night
Is white
Just staying on trend
All of the birds saying
"I love my foot"
While standing with their wings
"Grandparents' house, Mesa AZ" c. 1986 - 1987
"Sleeping Bear Dunes, Empire MI" 2010
Meditation and/or Mediator
Paunchy or thin spirited
She smokes additive free
Nibbling at a meal: control is a breath / is a choice
Pacing back and forth
Or pausing in the mud
