a poetics

In the framework of the reading series a poetics, authors Dimitra Ioannou and Ed Luker will read from their current works.

In her reading The New Present Tense, Dimitra Ioannou will compile a poetic assemblage comprising published and unpublished poems that respond to contemporary political and economic issues, contemplating language as a tool of propaganda, and suggesting ways of healing and resistance. She will read excerpts from her pamphlet Electric Sarcasm and her forthcoming book The Mink List.

Dimitra Ioannou is a poet and artist based in Athens. In her work she experiments with narrative or anti-narrative forms in various media (writing, photography, publications). Her publications include the chapbook Electric Sarcasm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and the experimental novella Soy Sea (Futura, Athens, 2008). Her (video) poems and photos have been exhibited in both solo and group shows throughout Greece. Additionally, she is the founding editor at A) GLIMPSE) OF) press, co-editor of the bilingual journal brossura, and runs experimental writing workshops named textlab. Her books Terminal Mimosa and The Mink List are both forthcoming.

Ed Luker will read poems from a collection in progress, tentatively titled Sky Gazing. These poems work through bird songs, sunsets, skylines, shimmering trees, pink hues, orange fire, and blue waters as the sites of affective transfer between Romanticist yearning and the ineluctable contradictions of late capitalism, as we experience it through technological mediation, ecological catastrophe, fascism, and war. His reading will attempt to enliven the lyric voice as a place of emotional movement, working through the tonal variations of the present.

Ed Luker is a writer and poet based in London. To date he has published two full length collections of poetry, Heavy Waters (2019) and Other Life (2020). He has recently published poems, prose, and critical essays in Poetry Project newsletter, Mubi Notebook, The London Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Frieze, Tank Magazine, Jacobin, and Plinth. He is currently working on his first novel, alongside a play and a new collection of poems from which he will read for this event.

Image: Dimitra Ioannou 

Alongside her new novel-in-progress, Notebooks of a She-Dandy, Robertson will read from The Baudelaire Fractal – her debut novel, which recounts a mystical experience of the young poet Hazel Brown, who wakes up one morning in a hotel room to realize she has written the complete works of Baudelaire. The protagonist  moves fluidly between the early 1980s and the present, from rented room to rented room, all the while considering such Baudelairian obsessions as the baroque secrets of urban space, fashion as metaphysical experience, and the cognitive play of painting.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and translator. Her publications include prose and poetry collections such as Boat (2022), 3 Summers (2016), Cinema of the Present (2014), Nilling (2012), Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (2009), Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (2021), as well as the annotated anthology Revolution: A Reader (2012), co-edited with Matthew Stadler. The Baudelaire Fractal was published by Coach House Books in 2020 and reissued by Peninsula Press in August 2023.

On the occasion of the exhibition Automatik by Margaret Raspé, the UK-based writers Mira Mattar and Lotte L.S. will read together from their recent texts.
 
Alongside new poems, Lotte L.S. will read from her essay collection A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a ‘death’, two solitudes, facades, four loose dogs, a doppelganger, a likeness, three airport floors, thirty-six weeks… – a series of poetic reflections on riots and collectivity, poetry and solitude that seek to understand what is included or excluded in the languaged record of individual and communal memory. In doing so, Lotte L.S. traces a politics and a poetics through the cities of Marseille, Athens, Kyiv, and the town of Great Yarmouth to ask, amidst the crises of our time: “When is your poetics, your politics, not implicated in someone else’s?”
 
Mira Mattar will read from her anti-bildungsroman Yes, I Am A Destroyer, a “fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing“ dedicated to female anger: “Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance”, as Lisa Robertson writes. Furthermore, Mattar will present excerpts from her long poem Affiliation, which negotiates the parallel logics of accretion and disintegration in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and the UK.
 
About the authors:
 
Lotte L.S. is a poet living in Great Yarmouth (UK). Her most recent texts have been published by Tripwire and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, among others. In addition to her own writing, she occasionally publishes texts by other authors – most recently, for example, she co-edited an English translation of poems by Moroccan poet and Marxist feminist Saïda Menebhi, who passed away in prison during a hunger strike in 1977 (See Red Press, 2021). Since 2021, Lotte has been the editor of a publication series focusing on overlooked stories and biographies from Great Yarmouth.
 
Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. Her novel, Yes, I Am A Destroyer was published in 2020 by Ma Bibliothèque and her chapbook, Affiliation, was published in 2021 by Sad Press. Her first collection of poems, The Bow, was recently published by The 87 Press. A new chapbook is forthcoming from Veer2. She lives and works in London.

Image: Adapted from a photo by Matti Sutcliffe

On the occasion of the exhibition Female Remedy, the authors Claire Finch and Rosanna Puyol will read from their current works.

Claire Finch will present their new experimental text project Wormfuck Fuckcave and read excerpts from their forthcoming publication Baise moi Judith: An anachronistic epistolary exchange including democratic theory, gender studies, and dildos, where love and the void question each other in action.
Rosanna Puyol will read from her poetry collection D’l’or. Based on conversations with friends and artists, her texts explore artistic processes as well as conversation as a form and starting point for collaborative writing.
 
About the authors:

Claire Finch writes experimental dykecore texts. They have presented their hybrid work, which connects poetry, theory, and performance, at the ICA London, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, the Palais de Tokyo Paris and the Fondation Ricard Paris. Among their projects are I Lie on the Floor (After 8 Books, Paris, 2021), Lettres aux jeunes poétesses (l’Arche, Paris, 2021), and Kathy Acker 1971-1975 (Editions Ismael, Lisbon, 2019). 
Rosanna Puyol is a poet and publisher who regularly collaborates with artists in exhibitions, performances and screening programs. Co-founder of the independent publishing house Brook, she focuses on translating essays and poetry engaged in feminist and antiracist struggles. Recent Brook publications include French translations of texts by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz and Laura Mulvey.