Antigone: Jennifer Conlon’s poetry debut

Jennifer Conlon’s poetry debut, Taking to Water with special guest: TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices Saturday, January 27th 4pm.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker
of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town.

Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety—wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

Taking to Water was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize.Join us for a reading on Saturday, February 10th at Rituals for Climate Change with Naomi OrtizDisability justice and ecojustice rarely are spoken in the same mouthful but are in constant conversation in our world. This mixed-genre manuscript of poetry and lyrical essay doesn’t contain just one point of view but encompasses dialectical perspectives which often exist in contradiction to each other. A disabled person is in need of plastic cups and concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist and what being in relationship with the land can look like.

This book is an offering to explore the spiritual question of how to witness. It serves as a companion to those also grappling with the difficult questions posed by climate change in the borderlands. By exploring the ways body, mind, and cultures both clash with and long for ecojustice, Rituals for Climate Change offers an often-overlooked perspective on climate-grief, interdependence, and resilience. Disabled people know how to adapt to a world that is ever changing without considering us.