Switchback Books and Counterpath Book Launch Party

Switchback Books and Counterpath invite you to celebrate the launch of three new books: The Body In Language: An Anthology, edited by Edwin Torres, from Counterpath; Kristen Case’s Principles of Economics from Switchback; and Irène Mathieu’s Grand Marronage from Switchback. Join us at Strum Guitar Bar for drinks and readings by Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Kristen Case, Brandon Downing, Stefania Heim, Jen Hofer, Irène Mathieu, Tracie Morris, Urayoán Noel, Jenn Marie Nunes, and Edwin Torres.
Contact: Switchback Books and Counterpath

Switchback Books and Counterpath invite you to celebrate the launch of three new books:

The Body In Language: An Anthology, edited by Edwin Torres, from Counterpath!

Kristen Case’s Principles of Economics from Switchback!

Irène Mathieu’s Grand Marronage from Switchback!

Join us at Strum Guitar Bar for drinks and readings by Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Kristen Case, Brandon Downing, Stefania Heim, Jen Hofer, Irène Mathieu, Tracie Morris, Urayoán Noel, Jenn Marie Nunes, and Edwin Torres.

BOOK INFO

On The Body in Language:

The question of the body’s place in language has enduring significance. Is there a more equivalent imprint on the language of our life than our own bodies? The Body In Language: An Anthology collects an extraordinary range of voices—including writers, artists, performers, and healing practitioners—to present new perspectives on the body in art by exploring the body in language. The selves/cells we release in creativity embody our fundamental being. Can we activate our connective senses to better understand how others make others?

Heather Christle on Principles of Economics:

Principles of Economics marks the movement of a body in consciousness, in love, in illness, and in grief. It explores how, in measured language, one might attempt to measure time and all its strange work. Arranged in glinting layers of associative and disjunctive lines, these poems are a quiet thrill. Reading them, I feel a simultaneous calmness and excitement. I trust that this poet’s bright mind knows just where to lead me, am happily surprised at each new place it goes.

Heather Christle on Grand Marronage:

Grand Marronage is a remarkable book, resolved to regard the difficulties and beauties of the past and present, to acknowledge the forces that would seek to control how both are seen, and to find the strength of its own steady gaze. These poems have a wild and courageous openness, full of intelligence and heart. The poet records “the dual wishes for her children to / write their own and to remember / the names of every ancestor before.” Grand Marronage makes a space where those wishes can breathe and grow.

AUTHOR BIOS

Rae Armantrout’s recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She lives in the Seattle area.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her poems and other work have appeared in Boston Review, Witness, Jacket, Harp and Altar, Forklift, Ohio, and with Kristi Maxwell in the new horse less press anthology New Pony. She is the author of Manifest (Switchback Books, 2013) and People Are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books, 2010).

Kristen Case’s chapbook, Temple, was published by MIEL in 2014, and her full-length collection, Little Arias (New Issues, 2015) won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. She is co-editor of the essay collection 21 | 19: Contemporary Poets and the North American Nineteenth Century, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She teaches English at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Brandon Downing’s books of poetry include The Shirt Weapon, Dark Brandon, AT ME and, most recently, Mellow Actions. A monograph of his literary collages from 1996 to 2008, Lake Antiquity, was released by Fence Books in 2009. In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of short digital films, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics. He lives in New York City.

Stefania Heim is author of the poetry collection A TABLE THAT GOES ON FOR MILES (Switchback 2014) and translator of GEOMETRY OF SHADOWS, metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems (forthcoming APS Books). She is a Poetry Editor at Boston Review and a current Visiting Faculty Member at Bennington College.

Jen Hofer is an LA-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. She has published 10 books in translation, 3 books of poetry, and numerous homemade books in DIY editions.

Dr. Irène P. Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher. She is the author of orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press, 2014). Her honors include Yemassee Journal’s Poetry Prize, Honorable Mention and Editor’s Choice awards in the Sandy Crimmins National Poetry contest, and runner-up for the Northwestern/Cave Canem book prize. She holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a MD from Vanderbilt University, and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.

Tracie Morris’s most recent book is Who Do With Words, Chax Press (second edition forthcoming,Feb. 2019). She is a poet, performer and theorist in performance studies. She’s currently the WPR Fellow at Harvard University.

Urayoán Noel is a Bronx-based poet, performer, translator, critic, and intermedia artist originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. He is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa, 2014) and seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico (Arizona, 2015). Noel is currently an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University and also teaches at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.

Jenn Marie Nunes is the author of And/Or (Switchback Books, 2015) and four chapbooks, including the collaborative Opera Trans Opera (alice blue books), and is founding coeditor of TENDE RLOIN, an online gallery for poetry. She lives in New Orleans with her girlfriend and her dog.

Edwin Torres is the author of eight books of poetry, including XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books, 2019), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), and Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books).

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her poems and other work have appeared in Boston Review, Witness, Jacket, Harp and Altar, Forklift, Ohio, and with Kristi Maxwell in the new horse less press anthology New Pony. She is the author of Manifest (Switchback Books, 2013) and People Are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books, 2010).