Thursday 6th February

LAUNCH: WAVE OF BLOOD BY ARIANA REINES

Please join us for the Glasgow launch of Wave Of Blood by Ariana Reines, published by Divided Publishing.

The event will feature Ariana Reines and Colin Herd in conversation as well as a reading by Daisy Lafarge.

"Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . ."

Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts and based in New York. Her books include A Sand Book—winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tuftfts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award—Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006. Her Obie-winning play Telephone was commissioned by the Foundry Theatre with a sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2009. Reines has created performances for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Swiss Institute, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Performance Space New York. She has taught poetry at UC Berkeley (Holloway Poet), Columbia, NYU, and Scripps College (Mary Routt Chair), been a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, and for community organizations including the Poetry Project and Poets House. Her poetry and prose have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, and many others. In 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines created Invisible College, an online space devoted to the study of poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.

Colin Herd is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. His books include Too Ok (2011), Glovebox (2013), Oberwilding - with SJ Fowler (2015), Click and Collect (2017), You Name It (2019) and Cocoa & Nothing - with Maria Sledmere (2022). He has also edited four anthologies of contemporary poetry. Dennis Cooper has written of his work that it is "exquisite and adventurous and armed to the teeth".

Daisy Lafarge is a writer and artist living in Glasgow. She is the author of Life Without Air (Granta 2020), Paul (Granta 2021) and Lovebug (Peninsula 2023). 

Tuesday 11th February

READINGS: KATHRINE SOWERBY, CÉCILE SEGURA, SASKIA MCCRACKEN & TESSA BERRING

Pleae join us for an evening of poetry celebrating new books, new poems, and the ongoing  experiment/elasticity of language.

Kathrine Sowerby lives in Glasgow and is author of chapbooks Unnecessarily Emphatic and Tired Blue Mountain (Red Ceilings Press), a collection of novellas The Spit, the Sound and the Nest (Vagabond Voices), poetry collections that bird loved (Hesterglock Press), House However (Vagabond Voices) and (Find Yourself) at Constant Falls (Blue Diode Press), and a collection of writing and drawing called Tutu (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). 

Cécile Segura collects seashells that she gives as love language. She favours physically cutting and glueing verses of memory her dissociative alters collect for each other. She has been sporadically published in Möbius zine, in residency at the Glasgow School of Art, and funded by the Lesbians of Public Interest. @letthemothunfold

Saskia McCracken is completing her nature writing debut, Awful Creatures: Encounters with Britain’s Unlovable Animals. Her poetry and short fiction publications include Imperative Utopia (-algia press), Cyanotypes (Dancing Girl Press), Common Name (Osmosis Press), and Zero Hours (Broken Sleep Books). She was shortlisted for the Future Places Environmental Essay Prize.  

Tessa Berring’s ‘Joke Book’ has just been published with The Silent Academy - ‘. . . a glimpse into all the digressions, asides, trains and traces of thought that make up a life’ (Vik Shirley)

‘Slips are allowed, even celebrated and we see the underlying joke in the room’
(Amy Todman)

She is also the author of Bitten Hair and Folded Purse (Blue Diode Press) and the pamphlets ‘Putty’ (If A Leaf Falls Press) and Cut Glass and No Flowers (Dancing Girl Press)