Poets on the Anthropocene

Poets on the Anthropocene

Harold Abramowitz (Blind Spot)
Amanda Ackerman (The Book of Feral Flora)
Michelle Detorie (After-Cave)
Thursday, April 30, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020

Three Southern California poets will read their work and discuss how the profound instability of the natural world informs their poetry, which often confronts the limitations of language while investigating forms that mirror our increasingly chaotic environment.

Michelle Detorie is the author of After-Cave (Ahsahta Press, 2014.) and numerous chapbooks, including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). In 2007, Michelle was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and in 2010 she won a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, “The Poetry Booth.” She recently completed The Sin in Wilderness, a book-length erasure about love, animals, and affective geography. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she edits Hex Presse and coordinates the Writing Center at Santa Barbara City College. She is also the poetry editor for the online literary journal Entropy.

Amanda Ackerman is the author most recently of The Book of Feral Flora as well as several chapbooks, including The Seasons Cemented (2010), I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (2011), and Short Stones (2012). With Harold Abramowitz, she coauthored the chapbook Sin is to Celebration (2009) and Man’s Wars And Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies and Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, And Ill-Will (forthcoming, 2015). She writes as part of the collaborative projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization), whose audio-text project Explanation as Composition was featured at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Harold Abramowitz’s books include Blind Spot (forthcoming from Les Figues Press), Man’s Wars And Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies & Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, & Ill-Will (with Amanda Ackerman, forthcoming from Bon Aire Projects), UNFO Burns A Million Dollars (with Amanda Ackerman, Gauss PDF), Not Blessed (Les Figues Press), and Dear Dearly Departed (Palm Press). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs (www.eohippuslabs.com) and writes and edits as part of the collaborative projects, SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.