Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

by CAConrad

Overview

Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. 

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote to animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are both hopeful and cautionary as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268962
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Prize. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia Universityin New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

Editorial Reviews

This book cements CAConrad as a deeply original voice committed to plumbing humanity's plights in unusual ways.”—Starred review in Publishers Weekly 

“In Amanda Paradise, past and future lives collide; entire epochs pass in one line-break; extinct bodies and feelings are resurrected so that CAConrad can reclaim a little more time(lessness).”—Jay Ying, Poetry Foundation

 “But if rooted firmly in the frequency of the immediate world, the poems are equally oriented to the horizon.”—Poets & Writers

“Profoundly, their poems stand with life and against the brutality, violence and bigotry that permeate our culture. It is a poetry at once of resistance and wonder.” —Sara Burant for OmniVerse 

 “...In addition to being the latest addition to CAConrad’s eminently interesting but confounding body of work, it might just be the most interesting-yet-confounding to date. Case in point: the final, very long (72-page) poem in the collection, “72 Corona Transmutations,” may be the best piece of COVID-related literature I’ve read during the whole of the pandemic.” —Kevin O’Rourke, Michigan Quarterly 

 “CAConrad sweeps across the Atlantic like a furious and raging whirlwind. Emerging from the queer visionary tradition of Whitman and Ginsberg, the cornerstone of CAConrad’s practice is a series of rituals and instructions which their readers are invited to share in… CAConrad’s aim is to unplug from the corporate machine and reconnect themselves and their readers with the earth and animals and other people. This is poetry with real ambition that wants to hug us – it’s big, it’s queer and, like paprika, you can never have enough of it.” —Philip Terry, The Guardian 

 “CAConrad’s Ecodeviance is a subversive syllabus for a queer ecopoetics, a set of twenty-three “(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals,” which are exercises, all at once, in magic, telepathy, transgression, confrontation, fantasy, wish-fulfillment, interspecies communication, self-healing, and writing.” —Charles Legere, The Boston Review 

From the Publisher