Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Thurs. Aug. 3 at 6pm, join Massy Arts and Dialogos / Lavender Ink for the double launch of Adeena Karasick’s latest poetry books: Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations and Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings .
Through a poetics of politically engaged aesthetic resistance, Ærotomania negotiates turbulence, loss, nostalgia and hope, while the poems in Ouvert Oeuvre speak-sing to re-entering the world after a long period in quarantine. Adeena will be joined by special guest Jim Andrews, who will be screening some of their recent vispo collaborations: Lorem Ipsum, Checking In 1, Checking In 2, Touching in the Wake of the Virus.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free and required for entrance.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About the books
Ærotomania: The Book of LumenationsLavender Ink, 2023)
A lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, and a visual feast in full color.
Marked by a playful “cognitive dissidence” and a lyrically and visually explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations is Karasick’s twelfth volume of poetry. Through a poetics of politically engaged aesthetic resistance, this work negotiates turbulence, loss, nostalgia and hope, inscribing a prescient “present” ever-arriving through jubilation and bereavement, in immanence and irruption, exposing how the airplane as an erotic theater functions like a language.
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (Lavender Ink, 2023)
An ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings.
Inscribing what Levinas might call “espace vital” (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. Written by Adeena Karasick and visualized by Warren Lehrer, the two poems track the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. They explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word opening, laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. The poems foreground language as an organism of hope–highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light. This book is the first collaboration between poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and pioneer designer/author and vis lit practitioner Warren Lehrer. The poems, written by Karasick, speak-sing to re-entering the world after a long period in quarantine. Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page and through the pages of this volume. His typographic compositions give form to the interior, emotional, metaphorical, historical and performative underpinnings of the poems. Together, the writing and visuals create a new whole that engages the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the poems. View the book’s website here.
About the author
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press: 2022), shortlisted for Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA, 2023) and winner of the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form. (MEA), Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, (NuJu Records, 2020), and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking, and has just been appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. Hot off the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, and Ouvert: Oeuvre: Openings, (Lavender Ink Press, 2023).
Also featuring:
Jim Andrews has been publishing https://vispo.com since 1996. It’s the centre of his work as a poet, visual artist, audio artist, theoretician and programmer. Vispo.com is a site of interactive, multimedia poetry.