We are very, very excited to be welcoming the legendary poet Nat Raha to Housmans for the official UK launch of her new book, apparitions (nines). A vital figure in UK, and wider Anglophone, vanguardist poetry for many years Raha’s newest experiment in lyric writing promises to be characteristically invigorating.

Reading alongside Nat we’ll have fabulous poetry from Mendoza, Christine Kirubi, Susannah Slack, Samuel Solomon abd Daniella Valz Gen.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha’s invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha’s invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry. Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from, and far surpasses, constraint.

OUR READERS:

Dr Nat Raha is a poet, activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.

Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018) and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Her performance work, epistolary (on carceral islands) was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2024); their article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, is due imminently in Social Text.

Mendoza, aka Linus Slug: Insect Librarian, is nonbinary neurodivergent poet and researcher. Their work evolves through a series of creative processes exploring the interaction between sound, image and text. The purpose of poetry making is not to speak of their experiences in neurotypical terms, but to describe how they navigate the world through their own embodied language in which familiar and unfamiliar terrain is disrupted. In doing so, they are liberated from neurotypical modes of thinking allowing them to de-construct / (re)construct the ‘self’ through the language of insects.  It is an act of nonconformity.

Publications include WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths, collaboration with Peter Manson (Materials, 2018); “the science of poetry : the poetry of science” Linus Slug / Peter Manson broadside (2015), and Type Specimen: An Observant Guide To Linus Slug (Contraband Books, 2014). Mendoza’s poetry can be heard at the Archive of the Now

dove Christine is an artist-poet based in London. Her debut collection WILDPLASSEN is out now with the87press.

Suzanna Slack is the author of Gummi Zone (2023), White Spirit Videotelephony (2023), The Shedding (2022), Luxury Profile (2021), The Poor Children (2021), Is This It? (2019), all produced by VF Press, and Happy Birthday Story (1998), by Atman.  The Poor Children was selected by Sophie Collins, author of Small White Monkeys, as a White Review 2022 Book of the Year.  The chapter (Money) from The Poor Children is to be included in a forthcoming book by Kris Dittel and Aneta Rostkowska as part of their ongoing Unruly Kinships project.  Suzanna writes memory trilogies, who knows why, and is producing another one while managing disabilities and care responsibilities. They are grateful for any help.

Sam Solomon lives in Brighton. He is author of Special Subcommittee (Commune Editions, 2017), Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2019), and co-translator from the Yiddish of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014). He is currently at work on a literary labour history of queer typesetting and has recently completed a second collection of poems.  

Process-led, Daniella Valz Gen’s work explores poetic experience through different forms of reading, writing, performing and making. They’re invested in a relational and responsive approach to land, place, and the other-than-human. Born in Peru and based in London, Valz Gen’s work highlights the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems as areas where potential new meanings can arise.  Valz Gen is the current writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery. They are a co-director of the analogue film cooperative not/nowhere and a lecturer in Fine Art. Valz Gen’s work has been shown at Glasgow International, SPILL Festival, Aichi Triennale, Gropius Bau among others. Subversive Economies, their first poetry collection, was published by PSS Press in 2018. Their writing has been featured in The Happy Hypocrite, Map Magazine, Salt, and others.

This a free event.

If you have any further enquiries please Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 7pm, Event Starts 7:30

P.S. BYOB