Unsub

Recasting the forensic and everyday language of the FBI's descriptions of unidentified subjects, from suspects to criminals to corpses, UNSUB probes what it is to be "wanted." It explores our desire to have and to hold in contempt those subjects that threaten a society of securitization. Investigating a culture of terrorism, paranoia, and surveillance by rendering a world divided into victims and perpetrators, UNSUB plays on the differences between catching a predator and being a catch. Through ghostly descriptions of live bodies, the book scrutinizes the vicissitudes of anonymity and subjectivity, indistinction and identity.

"By turning the forensic onto the forensic, Divya Victor splays the bodies of those wanted into bits of want: soldered-over scars and moulding desires, that glut of gut tissue and the rotting tongue's ability to speak another tongue. To UNSUB is not, as turns out, to unsubjectify, but to subjectify too highly. High as how meat goes when left too long by the side of the road. Like a graveyard, the poems make a more permanent point than its peoples: What we want is enough. And always too much."-Vanessa Place

"This is a work under the auspices of resemblances, the unknown subject, the step just beyond, or under. In Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin, hoards of narrative are sapped into wasp facial features. In UNSUB, Divya Victor shows us how these narratives get charged by ethnicity, a place, a thievery and a poverty of emigrations, migrations now virtual. We are fluttered by identifiers, yes, we are, leaving us still, too often, facing losses. I just checked, poetry is still alive."-Ara Shirinyan