An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value is a fragmented book-length essay in which we see the city of Detroit through two distinct seasons: the summer Quartararo worked with a letterpress artist in a former veal locker, and the winter she lived on a dead end street slated for possible removal next to a defunct highway overpass. We see the city from the seat of her bicycle, from the #42 bus, and for miles on foot as she meditates on the erasure of memories, the impermanence of bodies, and the disintegration of structures. Quartararo’s Detroit teems with life as she explores the ways people are both shaped by, and take shape of, landscapes.
PRAISE FOR An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value
“Subterranean salt mines, dredged figureheads, bags of chicken fat, highways, minivans held together by tape, repossessed streetlights, the shade of lipstick chosen by The Supremes—everything is alive at once in Quartararo’s prose, all of it shaping and unsettling the notion of self in the “blank” city of Detroit, where history is both as persistent and ignorable as the weeds that push their way through cracks in concrete. Quartararo removes all hierarchy between self and artifact; each thing lives on the page with poetic attention, so the reader is host to the reverb that rises up from the spaces between them, the reverb of trying to make a life in a place that is both here for the taking and already punishingly, gloriously full.”
—Meghan Gilliss, author of Lungfish: A Novel
“Greta Ehrlich once used the term “a hard roadbed” in her book A Solace for Open Spaces, and Jennifer Quartararo’s collection, An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value, is just that: a hard roadbed of rumblings not involving but evolving time, people, and land—land as a body moving through spaces and time, a beautiful, brilliant lost signal we all might be searching for.”
—Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura: A Memoir.
“Displayed in fragments and fractures, Jennifer Quartararo’s prose encroaches on the boundaries of decay and displacement, bringing the reader in close to the lives and moments contained therein. In a stark and crumbling form suggesting the fall-out of a former glory, Quartararo’s is a world in which nothing is forever, constant shiftings of asphalt and corporate rise and fall. An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value asks the reader to consider the worth of the minuscule, the overlooked, the ways in which we navigate in order to preserve and persevere.”
—Jenny Boully, author of The Body: An Essay and Betwixt and Between
“Jennifer Quartararo’s An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value is a fascinating book that asks, what can a city and a body withstand and endure? This narrator examines Detroit—sometimes while pedaling through broken marble streets looking for wildflowers—and she sees decay, but she also sets her gaze upon beauty, history, and language. The result is an ever-shifting portrait of place and perspective, bound together with Quartararo’s singular lyric voice.”
—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value is a groundbreaking book. Jenna Quartararo examines in powerful and expertly distilled fragments the myriad histories of Detroit, Michigan, and traces them to its various contemporary milieus. In this way, Quartararo associatively grapples toward a larger statement on (and perhaps redefinition of) the nature of so-called “blight” (and its diverse causes, manifestations, and effects), as well the ways in which elements of beauty can dovetail with elements of decay. Stylistically experimental (via its play on the page with acts of formal erasure, destruction, and reconstruction), and tonally refreshing, An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value recalls the early work of Eula Biss. An audacious and exhilarating debut book-length essay.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers