Book

Praise for Insert Coin

[Cover Design by nonpolygon,

aka, Ian Finch]

Insert Coin is available to pre-order ​right now for a $2 discount until Nov. ​10th. Go to the Finishing Line Press ​website to order it. The release date is ​Jan. 10th. I’m so happy this book will be ​in the world soon!

In Insert Coin the reckless project of American capitalism and imperialism is felt ​through four characters—a contestant, a drone operator, a monster, and a prisoner​—who interact in a world of game shows, chain-of-command killing, and confusion ​around the virtual and the real. Through video games, fantasy, and drone warfare ​by joystick, the book chronicles dissociation and denial as well as a soul longing for ​meaning in a world whose absurd violence and demand for profit feels simulated ​but is all too real. Insert Coin launches an experimental syntax with strict formal ​constraints, such as a 6-syllable line by 8-line stanza sequence to suggest the ​unbearable dimensions of a solitary confinement cell. In these poems, a civilization ​that can only imagine destruction asks, “how do I get to the next level?”

Insert Coin is indelibly shaped by the atrocities committed by the United States during its ​interminable War on Terror while meditating on the structures that underlie that violence, ​including the cultural form of the video game. For all the seemingly disembodied virtuality of our ​digital lives, of the simulacral experience of what theorist McKenzie Wark calls gamespace—“I’m in ​a video / game and there’s no way out”—Joshua Zelesnick tirelessly attends to the material realities ​of what it means to be human in the infowhelm throughout this superb collection, to the bodies, ​feelings, affects, and images of those who have to navigate this space—which is also battlespace, ​dronespace. Page after page of Insert Coin confronts the fact that “constructing walls can’t defend ​us / from our tectonic heart,” and this collection’s remarkable, dense poems document some of the ​more difficult aspects of what it means to live on this late planet in this late year of late empire, ​this “strange electronic limbo, white / hot clarity of nightmare / in infrared, heat signatures / ​ghostly white against the cool black earth.” Zelesnick’s work also holds out poetry as an alternative ​to the eradicating quantification that defines so much of contemporary life, inviting us to hear and ​see and sing and feel some other space of play, a space against and beyond the violence of the ​digital, what we might call a poetryspace.

–Bradley J. Fest, author of 2013-2017: Sonnets (2024)

Zelesnick’s language game places a jar not in Tennessee but to the wall(s): listens proper, listens ​the better to hear a prisoner’s voice; cracked shouts; grandmothers; children’s rhymes; tulips; a ​command, light em up; reported statistics then applause; some audience… These all come through ​and are formed in rough clay into this almost-story taking almost-place on a large empty plain, the ​figures and characters becoming, as we read, haunted and haunting. Insert Coin is a fabulous, ​furious book.

–Kate Northrop, author of Homewrecker (2022)

I found a narrow form of six-syllable lines and eight-line stanzas to reflect the six-foot by eight -​foot cell solitary confinement prisoners are forced to live in. So begins Joshua Zelesnick‘s ​meticulous, terse, fearsome book, Insert Coin. Extraordinary the way these poems unflinchingly ​confer their intelligence on suffering, burrowing deep into the dehumanized and dystopic: the ​prisoner in the embassy/the prisoner in solitary/the prisoner with sleep-deprived/ eyes still pale as ​a suffocating/fish…the prisoner as a meme. Zelesnick’s poems arise out of the crises of the era, and ​they provide that era with a relentless, formidable critic.

–Lynn Emanuel, author of Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing (2023)

Chapbook

Click below to read Josh's chapbook, Cherub Poems.

To buy a copy, send him an email - $12

Published by Bonfire Books

Book Design by Sten Carlson

Selected Publications

Schedule of Readings

Fri, Jan. 19, 2024 - Bonfire Reading Series, Pittsburgh, PA. Benefit to raise money for Gaza civilians

Thurs, April 11, 2024 - Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY.

Bio & Contact

Joshua Zelesnick writes poetry and essays and fiddles around on the guitar or ukelele most evenings, likely and preferably with his two kids either playing nearby or hanging on him. Insert Coin, his first full length collection of poems--a ten-year project that scrutinizes drone warfare, the colonization of virtual and physical space by banks, the moons of Saturn, and video games--was a finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize at Conduit Books and Ephemera and the Trio Award at Trio House Press and will be published by Finishing Line Press in January 2025. Bonfire Books published his chapbook Cherub Poems in 2019. His poetry and essays can be found in Jubilat, Texas Review, Drunken Boat/Meridian Anthology, Matter, Word For/Word, Juked, Labor Notes, Counter Punch, Yes Poetry, DIAGRAM, and other journals. He has taught at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and is now a Librarian and creative writing teacher at a public school in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his partner and kids in a garden co-housing community. With friends, he helps host an occasional living-room music and reading series.

jpzelesnick@yahoo.com