Taking up the architecture and sonics of surveillance, Mallika Singh’s first chapbook, Retrieval explores the relationship between intimacy, data, and the structures of violence that entwine them. Singh’s work grows out of a study of the AT&T building in Lower Manhattan at 33 Thomas Street, revealed in 2016 to be TITANPOINTE, one of many operative NSA sites. Conceived as a self-contained city, the windowless structure is stocked with two-weeks’ worth of food and supplies and built to withstand earthquakes and nuclear attacks. At night, it hums, resounding with data that is protected and prized above the human life which generates it.

Environmentally expansive, Singh's poems move between city and soil to think communication and protection outside of empire's forms and to ask what cannot be, perhaps refuses to be, catalogued, surveilled, quantified, and defined.

Author: Mallika Singh
Year: 2020
Pages: 47
Dimensions: 8 x 6 in.
Cover: Softcover
Process: Risograph 
Language: English