This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an “extreme present” set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. After his boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.

Edited by Axel Wieder, with texts by Robert Glück, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Pauline Oliveros, Adrienne Rich and contributions by Basma Alsharif, Erika Balsom, CAConrad, Adam Christensen, Beatrice Gibson, Mason Leaver-Yap, Eileen Myles, Irene Revell.

Deux Soeurs brings together a chorus of voices that explore representations of parenthood, friendship, and disobedience. The book acts as a reader to artist Beatrice Gibson’s films, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) and Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019), and includes material that informed Gibson’s working process, together with the artist’s texts and notes used in both films.

Designed by HIT.

You can listen to Beatrice Gibson’s podcast What’s Love Got To Do With It  here.

Produced on the occasion of CAConrad’s Mapping Dimensions 27, a multi-part series of writing workshops at: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

“CAConrad will create a (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual at KW Institute for Contemporary Art based on the work of Ian Wilson. For the two-day workshop he will use handmade maps and a reconfigured version of Jason Dodge’s sculpture A golden lightning rod pointing north to study the many aspects of our planet’s directional points of East and West. He will use these references to explore life and death, as the known and the unknown forces of our world and how these directional archetypes help and hinder our lives. This is a love letter to the Future Wilderness of our world.”

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition AS SOON AS THE INVENTED LANGUAGE ENTERS US SOMETHING ELSE WILL VIBRATE IN OUR SKIN at Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli, 19 December, 2019–20 February, 2020. With a text by Raimundas Malašauskas.

The title of this exhibition was written by CAConrad.

More information on the show can be found here.