This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an "extreme present" set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. 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.

Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2014
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Winner of The Believer Poetry Award

From these rituals come notes; from those notes come poems; and from those poems comes not just a view into his process, but an entrance into another present, which a reader could as easily follow on her own — across the page as a poem, or across time as a performance of the same ritual. — Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe

 

ECODEVIANCE is a subversive syllabus for a queer ecopoetics, ... exercises, all at once, in magic, telepathy, transgression, confrontation, fantasy, wish-fulfillment, interspecies communications, self-healing, and writing. — Charles Legere, Boston Review

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. 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.

Wave Books, 2014, 160pages.