A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon - New (Soma)tics

By CAConrad

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• this mechanistic world…has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry
  
  Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.

• The world gives us cops and cops and cops and cops and cops, but CAConrad gives us Breton-trumping anarcho-lyric behavior and l’amo[u]r mundi fou.
  Anne Boyer
  
  The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form—they both invent a new genre and help increase freedom from the double tyrannies of both the tired narrative form and short, personal lyric form. Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory. 
  Sean Singer, The Rumpus
  
  Conrad’s now-discursive, now-fragmentary poetry offers us a mirror we may hold up to ourselves, if only we dare; eccentric, insistent, passionate, and indubitably wide-eyed, it also reflects those precious human traits we too often leave by the wayside on our dreary, unprofitable, and finally destructive searches for well-assimilated lives and loves.
  Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

  CAConrad's new book is a strange and wondrous collection of texts. Physically and emotionally intimate, by turns vulnerable, outrageous, and hilarious, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon asks that we seriously consider the power of poetry as a lived and embodied practice.
  Abraham Avnisan, Rain Taxi
  
  It’s a book for people, I should say. Everyone can be found and find in it. When I go through the work, I like to think of Conrad as more of a guide than an author. He’s there working with you and for you. I like that—it’s a caring there. It made me happy.
  Tom Trudgeon, HTMLGiant
  
  If the motto of the Situationists, with whom Conrad has much in common, was “Be realistic—demand the impossible!”, then a suggested motto for those wishing to proceed in the spirit of Conrad might be, “Be reasonable—do what is insane!”... Conrad’s most recent book of poems, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, is a guide to practical insanity.
  Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Exit Strata
  

• CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest books are Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (forthcoming, 2024) and AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). 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 University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.