Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
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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 with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious 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.
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How are we to believe in Earth if we can’t believe in the Heavens? In the plodding directionlessness of the present, we are lost without the astral maps. I want to point out too CAConrad’s signature care for the visual impact of the poem. The disciplined shaping means that the poetic line here not only carries sound and sentiment but builds toward a striking sculptural presence. CAConrad’s is poetry that reaches for multidimensionality, and in this poem, the arc and increment of indentation is a convincer, moving with and toward the poem’s conclusion.
Anne Boyer, The New York TimesCAConrad suggests, to “learn how/ to live so/ wilderness/ never/ becomes/ mythology.” As the climate crisis intensifies, these affecting and imaginative poems offer readers a space to reflect on what still remains.
Publishers Weekly[The poems] flow beautifully together, critiquing the wrongs of humanity while maintaining optimism for the goodness of nature.
staff pick (Molly), Literati Bookstore -
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.
Publication month: April 2024
ISBN# 9781950268962 (5.5x9, 105pp, paperback)
ISBN# 9798891060012 (5.5x9, 105pp, limited edition hardcover)
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