Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

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 to animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are both hopeful and cautionary 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.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Prize. 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.