risk :: nonchalance

Selected by Hoa Nguyen as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize Seeking a trans poetics in encounter’s work, the interlocking poems in risk :: nonchalance ask: what more do you want me to risk for our art practice? Gesture originates in bodies moving — no, citation — no, on the page — no, on the bus. In wacky, asymmetrical scale, embodiment’s impossible questions hang on fragments of schema, meta juice bogs down tiny lines, and line breaks signal perceptual shifts through which individual and collective gestures rotate. This is a break-up book, if what is breaking up is the notion that there is a lover or a reader or a non-essentializing feminism waiting faithfully outside the poem, immune to its machinations. The poems document two dance process the author participated in, in Philadelphia and Toronto, during the spring of 2016.