"Endless Garment rips one last attitude adjustment focus love song to the planet, slaps concrete wood, goes bongo with selfie." – Tan Lin

"Endless Garment is a long poem in the tradition of poetry-is-everywhere-you-find-it. This text will renew your love for the repurposed, rekindle your joy for the unexpected." – Robert Fitterman

"Earnest and ironic, fleeting and iconic, parading through these pages to celebrate 'art as a way of survivel.'" – Matvei Yankelevich

This debut poetry book reclaims the language of T-shirts as found poetry, capturing the collisions and lyricism of global clothing culture. Endless Garment is an unfurling poem stitched together from text printed on found T-shirts. Drawn from a decade-long archival project by the artist collective Shanzhai Lyric, this 147-page collection is a testament to their transcription of hundreds of mass-produced garments all over the world. From "CHANEL COCO CHRISTIAN DIOP" to "CHOP YOUR OWN / WOOD / AND IT W LL WARM YOU," these linguistic aberrations reveal the chaos of the garment industry as it moves through bootleg economies.

Bio:

Shanzhai Lyric (est. 2015) is a roving poetic research unit exploring radical logistics and linguistics through technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. Drawing inspiration from the experimental English of “shanzhai” (counterfeit) T-shirts made in China, they examine how mimicry, hybridity, and permutation reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Incomplete Poem, their roving archive of poetry garments, circulates through poetry-lectures, publications, and installations. In 2020, they founded the fictional office of Canal Street Research Association to probe ideas of ownership and property through bootleg as method. Their work has been presented at MoMA PS1, Abrons Arts Center, Artists Space, Sculpture Center, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Stuart Hall Library, Times Museum, Amant, and others with writings in The New Inquiry and ArtReview Asia.