Brenda Iijima – författare

At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge? Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the “golden spike”: a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata—a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth’s biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology? Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility—of violence and/or of budding community.

At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge? Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the “golden spike”: a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata—a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth’s biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology? Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility—of violence and/or of budding community.

How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress? How do poetic languages, forms, structures, syntaxes, and grammars contend or comply with the forces of environmental disaster? Can innovating languages forward the cause of living sustainably in a world of radical interconnectedness? In what ways do vectors of geography, race, gender, class, and culture intersect with the development of individual or collective ecopoetic projects?Contributors include: Karen Leona Anderson, Jack Collom, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, Brenda Iijima, Peter Larkin, Jill Magi, Tracie Morris, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Julie Patton, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Jonathan Skinner, and Tyrone Williams.Co-published with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs