Sunday, February 12th
720 Records in Lawrenceville
5-7PM
free and open to the public

If the topsy turvy winter weather has you wondering about the environment and our place in it, by all means come out for this event!

It perhaps needn’t be said, but human activity has had an intensely powerful effect on the environment — from transforming entire landscapes, to creating the largest dump heap in the history of man, to modifying the genetic code of the life forms around us. This event reconsiders what “nature” might be in today’s world and how that impacts our relationship to the spaces we inhabit and the lifeforms we encounter. Come explore how poetry can help us think through these processes and lead us to a space of potential regeneration.

Join us for POETRY ((PRO) (FANA))’s debut as we hear author/editor Brenda Iijima and scholar Sha LaBare each share from their work.

Brenda Iijima grew up in North Adams, Massachusetts, and studied visual arts at Skidmore College. Based in Brooklyn, New York, she teaches and edits for Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, a publisher of poetry. Iijima’s poetry collections include Around Sea (2004), Animate, Inanimate Aims (2007), Subsistence Equipment (2008), Revv. You’ll—ution (2009), and If Not Metamorphic (2010). In her work, Iijima addresses the subjects of science, gender, ecology, and history. She is also the editor of eco language reader (2010), a collection of essays by poets on matters of ecological concern.

Sha LaBare is a widgeteer, nexistentialist, and straight up univore who works on science fiction as a way of thinking about and being in the world. He is particularly interested in radical ecological ethics and making first contact with the aliens all around us right here on earth. Sha recently completed his PhD – Farfetchings: on and in the sf mode – in the History of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz, where he worked under the direction of Donna Haraway. As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Humanities Center, his current project is called “The Ecology of Everyday Life”. This project focuses on creating and expanding sense of wonder in our encounters with the memes, critters, and widgets that make up the texture and tenor of our everyday lives.