Please join us Saturday, June 24th at 2pm, for the dual book launch of Ada Smailbegović’s The Cloud Notebook (Litmus Press, 2023) and Michael Nardone’s edited work Aural Poetics (OEI 2023). The poets will be joined by artists Tiziana La Melia and Ellis Sam.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
About the books
OEI #98-99: Aural Poetics (368 pages), edited by Michael Nardone
”The domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices. The works of these pages instantiate (as compositions) and contemplate (as critical texts) the differing degrees in which techniques of the body enter into dynamic relation with modes of inscription, forming a feedback loop that co-constitutes their capacities. To this degree, an aural poetics – in opposition to the vast discourse of its homonym – can evade the facile separation of an essentialized “oral” and “written,” veer away from the technological determinism and psychosocial developmental model that commentators have grafted upon this faux binary, and compel us to imagine and examine composition across artistic practices through assessing specific articulations of materials and occasion. Here, listening is manifold.” (Michael Nardone, Editorial Afterword)
With contributions by: Raven Chacon, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Dylan Robinson, Constance DeJong, Eyvind Kang, Gail Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Damon Krukowski, Candice Hopkins + Raven Chacon, Merlin Sheldrake, Amber Rose Johnson, John Melillo, Heather Davis, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Diane Glancy, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sophie Seita, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Patrick Nickleson, Dalie Giroux, Simon Brown, Dalie Giroux + François Lemieux, Mitchell Akiyama, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Michael Nardone, Marshall Trammell, Luke Nickel, Lauren (Lou) Turner, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato, Nicholas Komodore, Lewis Freedman, Tiziana La Melia + Ellis Sam, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Alexandre St-Onge, Danny Snelson, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Raymond Boisjoly, Max Ritts, Steven Feld + Xenia Benivolski, Tom Miller, Daniel Borzutsky, Anne Bourne, and Marcus Boon.
Ada Smailbegović’s debut collection, The Cloud Notebook, is long poem that unfolds from the narrative instability and fracturing that occurs from experiences of forced displacement and war, gender and power. Rendering spaces of waiting, suspension, and a kind of fractal recurrence in which the fragment is held, revisited, and re-performed in memory, Smailbegović explores how languages and objects come to compose worlds, as well as to carry traces of dislocated and disappearing worlds. The poem assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a “migrant orientation” as a continuous problematic of narration or representation. Deftly dissolving the seam between language and sensation, material and thought, The Cloud Notebook is at once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic.
“The Cloud Notebook is like an impressionist painting, like the punctum detail of a collage. It’s a smart, soulful, traumatized and elegant collection.” — Tracie Morris
About the authors
Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. Editor of the Documents on Expanded Poetics book series (Anteism) and the critical journal Amodern, he is the author of two works of poetry: The Ritualites (2018) and Transaction Record (2014). Recently, Nardone launched his performative book work with choreographer and live artist Dana Michel, entitled Yellow Towel: A Score, at the Festival Trans-Amériques.
Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and living in a series of geographical displacements between Providence, Vancouver and New York. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. She is a cofounder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Select critical and poetic works have included “Of Poodles, Mockingbirds and Beetles: Gertrude Stein’s Zoopoetics” (College Literature, 2019), “From Code to Shape” (differences, 2018), The Forest / On Waiting (Doublecross Press, 2017), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015) and “Of the Dense and Rare” (Triple Canopy, 2013). Her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds was published by Columbia University Press in 2021.
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer born in Palermo (IT), raised in the Syilx Okanagan and lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh people. She is the author of The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and the winner of the RBC Painting Prize (2014).
Ellis Sam is a 3rd generation Chinese Canadian who resides on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. His work is focused on storytelling through the language of music and the rhythms of video.