by CAConrad

Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another
CAConrad
pântano books - 15.00€ -  out of stock

Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another gathers a selection of CAConrad’s soma(tic) poems, written from rituals performed by the author, which call for a state of consciousness grounded in the now and an awareness of bodies, their environmental entanglements and social histories. This is a poetry for surpassing, politically charged yet meditative and quotidian. CAConrad's poetry is rooted in legacies of both struggle and friendship arising from the AIDS crisis, as well as in contemporary imaginations of belonging in an ecologically broken world. This selection of poems is accompanied by an extensive interview with the author, complete with photographs and transcripts, as well as the theater play The Obituary Show. This publication accompanies Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another, an exhibition by CAConrad, curated by pântano books and commissioned by Batalha Centro de Cinema. 

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of nine books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects, with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was adapted into film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. UK Penguin published two books of theirs in 2023, The Book of Frank and You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis, and a new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024, titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. This publication accompanies Hidden in the Cave We Forge of One Another, an exhibition by CAConrad, curated by pântano books for Batalha Centro de Cinema in 2023. You can visit CAConrad online. 

The Book of Frank
CAConrad
Wave Books - 16.00€ -

A portrait equal parts hope and cruelty, this searing, compelling book is an enduring fan favorite by Philadelphia-based poet CAConrad.

The poems capture moments, and they don't explain themselves. But, cumulatively, they invoke a sense of what it is like to be almost supernaturally sensitive, empathic, curious, responsive. In short: what it feels like to be a poet, possessed by a muse. - Charles Kruger, The Rumpus

I've grown to love CA Conrad--the man, the work, and all he attempts and represents--because he always argues (from the inside of his poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. His kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of his 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

CAConrad is the author of The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real and Imagined (Factory School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. In 2011, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Amanda Paradise
CAConrad
Wave Books - 18.00€ -

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

(Soma)tic and resulting poems
CAConrad
Fivehundred places - 10.00€ -  out of stock

A collection of new poems following their (Soma)tics practice.

Fivehundred places was founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. 

While Standing in Line for Death
CAConrad
Wave Books - 22.00€ -  out of stock

After their boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome their depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
CAConrad
Wave Books - 18.00€ -  out of stock

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.

Ecodeviance
CAConrad
Wave Books - 22.00€ -

A series of 23 (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.

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