CAConrad: Launching Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return with Anne Boyer

*Please note the change of venue as we outgrew the bookshop!*

We are over the moon to be hosting CAConrad for the launch of their emergent ritual, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return - a Saturday night special hosted by the brilliant Anne Boyer.

Breathing, moving, living on the page, CAConrad’s exhilarating work is centred on the (Soma)tic ritual, their celebrated practice which draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an ‘extreme present’ of unfettered creativity from which poems can emerge.

‘One of America’s most legendary living poets’ – Ocean Vuong

About the book

Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return gathers the results of a single new ritual, focused on fellow animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, and spanning environments from Seattle – a city built amid an abundant non-tropical rainforest – to the Mojave Desert.

The poet receives gifts from a crow; associates different parts of their body with nine different species encountered in the desert; and joins a woman each morning in feeding rats in the streets of Rome, taking turns looking out for the police.

Written with urgency, hope, anger and joy, the poems that result are an ode to survival in a world that humanity has poisoned, and a testament to a love that knows no by-laws.

So join us in-person or online for an evening of reading, discussion and creativity through CAConrad’s (literally and metaphorically) moving work, which will be chaired by the wondrous Anne Boyer!

Bio

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales. Visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

Anne Boyer is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her works include The Undying, Garments Against Women, and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a Windham-Cambell prize, the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, and a Whiting Award. Originally from the United States, she now lives in Edinburgh and teaches poetry and poetics at the University of St. Andrews.