First Light

By CAConrad

• Description
• Reviews

• In this powerful meditation on sunrise, beloved poet CAConrad presents an electrifying new collection of poems.

  Guided by a (Soma)tic poetry ritual for writing while observing sunrise—in person and across the world via live public webcam footage—First Light is permeated with the immediacy of living through anthropocenic times and the murmurs of relations past and present. CAConrad's distinctive poems emerge from the page in sculptural forms, which have been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions in the US and around the world. At once contemplative and stirring, these poems “sing on behalf of the whole organism.”

  
  

• Previous Praise:
  

  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 does an excellent job of fusing their innovative, but very much down-to-earth poetic technique with their politically-engaged sensibilities to create work that speaks to the aesthetic and political concerns of the contemporary moment.
  Andrea Syzdek, Against the Grain
  
  CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.
  Eileen Myles
  
  At a time when I don’t always know how to make sense of what’s going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer.
  Jillian Steinhauer, New York Times
  
  It’s very possible that CAConrad is the most interesting poet currently working in the United States.
  Kevin O'Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review
  
  There was a time some of us believed poetry and poets could save the world; CAConrad never stopped believing it—and in that belief, and in poems produced under the sign of belief, we can witness an extroverted existentialism that just may be the last best hope for poets and non-poets alike.
  Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post
  
  Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory.
  Sean Singer, The Rumpus
  
  His books are filled with alluringly odd and dark images that could rival William S. Burroughs. Conrad, an out-and-proud gay activist, fills his poems with his own brand of spirituality and loving gay sexuality.
  A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer
  
  It is rare to find a poet who can admit, without losing face, that the voice of the world is often their own. It is still more rare to find one who can do so without losing our interest. CAConrad is one such poet.
  Mary Wilson, Make Magazine
  
  Conrad isn’t interested in that sort of perfection; it’s the messy business of being in the world that Conrad is after, and which allows him to reach for “seismic levels of wildness.”
  Abraham Avnisan, Rain Taxi