COUNTER-DESECRATION: Collective Remedying // Launch

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Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying.”
–Alison Hedge Coke

On Earth Day, The Poetry Project will host the East Coast launch of Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed and published by Wesleyan University Press. Join editor Linda Russo and contributors Thom Donovan, Marcella Durand, Brenda Iijima, E.J. McAdams, Evelyn Reilly, and Asiya Wadud as they share their terms, repurposed words, and neologisms from the collective glossary that map approaches to the interlinked social, economic, and environmental forces that shape relations between places, individuals, and other species imperiled in the Anthropocene. Event will include contributor readings/performances and a roundtable.

Online tickets are available at the link above until an hour before this event. Unless otherwise noted, tickets will continue to be available at the door.

Thom Donovan

Thom Donovan is the author of numerous books, including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses Of Fire. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. His current projects include a book of poems and other writings based upon the compositions of Julius Eastman, a book of critical essays regarding poetics, political practice, and the occult, and an ongoing “ante-memoir”; entitled Left Melancholy.

Photo: Andrew Zawacki

Marcella Durand

Marcella Durand‘s books include The Prospect, Rays of the Shadow, Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard, Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, AREA, and Traffic & Weather, written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her translation from French of Michèle Métail’s book-length piece, Earth’s Horizons/Les horizons du sol, was published this year by Black Square Edition

Brenda Iijima

Brenda Iijima’s involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of poetry, research movement, visual arts, floral and faunal consciousness and ecological sociology. Her current work focuses on missing persons and submerged histories, extinction and other-than-human modes of expression. A developing project involves choreography and vocalization centered on Fort Massachusetts, in her hometown of North Adams, Massachusetts. She is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. Her most recent book, Remembering Animals was published by Nightboat Books in 2016. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL). Iijima is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, located in Brooklyn, NY (http://yoyolabs.com/).

Photo: Stephen DeVita

E.J. McAdams

E.J. McAdams is a poet and artist, exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He has published three chapbooks: ‘4×4’; from unarmed journal press, ‘TRANSECTs’; from Sona Books, and this month ‘Out of Paradise,’ an e-chapbook from Delete Press. He exhibited an installation called Trees Are Alphabets at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. He curated the Social-Environmental-Aesthetics reading at EXIT ART from 2009-2012 and was a founding board member of the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Art Nature and Dance (iLAND).  

Linda Russo

Linda Russo’s work engages interspecies landscapes/land use and experiential and ideological geographies. She is the author of several books of poems including Participant (Lost Roads Press, 2016), winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize, and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman, 2015). To Think of her Writing Awash in Light (Subito, 2016) is a collection of lyrical essays. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan UP, 2018) is co-edited with Marthe Reed. She lives on the ceded lands of the Nez Perce Tribe in the inland northwestern US where she teaches creative writing and curates an ecoarts project in the wild edge spaces of her industrial-agricultural landscape.

Evelyn Reilly

Evelyn Reilly is the author of Styrofoam, Apocalypso, and Echolocation, all published by Roof Books, as well as Hiatus (Barrow Street Press) and Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs). Her poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, among them The Arcadia Project: Postmodernism and the Pastoral, The & NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing, Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, and The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times. She lives in New York City and works as a writer for natural history and cultural museums.

Asiya Wadud

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird (Nightboat Books, 2018) day pulls down the sky… a filament in gold leaf, written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (Belladonna/ Danspace, 2019), Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) and the forthcoming No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. Asiya is a 2019–2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist-in-Residence and also currently a writer-in-residence at Danspace Project. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.