Waves Breaking

This month's guest is Aeon Ginsberg. We dug into their recently published book Greyhound and also talked about PoBiz/Big Lit, death, and teeth poetry.

Aeon Ginsberg (they/them) is an agender transfeminine writer and performer from Baltimore City, MD. They are the author of Greyhound, the 2019 winner of the Noemi Press Poetry Prize, and their work has been published in various magazines in print and online. Aeon is a Taurus, a bartending, and a bitch.

Aeon's website

Aeon's Twitter account

Go get Greyhound!

Writers, news, books, events mentioned in this episode:

• Aeon's previous chapbooks:

  • Until the Cows Come Home (Elation Press, 2016)

  • Loathe/Love/Lathe (Nostrovia! Press, 2017)

• Yanyi has written an excellent article regarding PoMag's "trans issue" and critiquing special issues in general: "Counting Tokens: Special Issues and the Theatre of Delay."

• #BeyondSpecialIssue folio organized by jayy dodd

• Roy Guzman on what happened after their close reading of Toby Martinez de las Rivas's published and fascist work "Titan / All Is Still" in PoMag's Nov 2018 issue.

• PoFound statement about how they plan to reorient themselves and dismantle white supremacist practice in their organization.

• "Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA," in Salon

• speCt! books open letter to PoFound at the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

• "MICA professor resigns after former student alleges misconduct, says she informed college two years ago," in The Baltimore Sun.

• Isobel Bess (sorry for accidentally using her previous name!)

• Jamie Berrout

• Marxist Poetry Podcast

• Magpie Killjoy's I Pity The Immortal

• RBG's personal trainer doing push-ups in front of her casket

• Chen Chen

• Shazia Hafiz Ramji

• David Davis

• Kayleb Candrilli

• Chris, a Christine and the Queens album

• "Hello -- A Greeting From Nowhere"

• Anne Boyer's What Resembles A Grave

• Peach Mag

• Fargo Tbakhi's 12 World's Interrupted By The Drone

• Aeon made a Spotify playlist of songs that are in conversation with their book

• Anne Carson quote: "If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it."

The Sound of Waves Breaking is this video Aeon sent me of Vin Diesel singing Rhianna.

Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz

If you want to get in contact with me, you can email me at [email protected] and/or message me @WavesBreakPod on Twitter.

This month I got to speak with Kama La Mackerel about their just-released book, ZOM-FAM, published by Metonymy Press. We go in-depth in discussion about their decolonial artistic practices and inspiration for the book.

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama's work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial practice through cultural production. Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. They have lived in far-flung places such as Pune, India and Peterborough, Ontario. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection is published by Metonymy Press. GO BUY ZOM-FAM! Kama's website

Media, artists, books, etc mentioned in this episode:

• Kama will get to perform ZOM-FAM in Montreal this October :)
• "The Self-Love Cabaret: L'Amour se conjugue à la première personne"
• "From Thick Skin to Femme Armour," performance
• Artists who made the ZOM-FAM cover: Kai Yun Ching and Aun Li
• Kalapani
• "My Body is the Ocean" project and performance
• "Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard" project
• Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
• Disclosure documentary
• Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), by Hazel Jane Plante
• My Art is Killing Me and Other Poems, by Amber Dawn
• "Explained: How Severe was the Mauritius Oil Spill," article in The Indian Express
• "Mauritius calls for urgent help to prevent oil spill disaster," article in The Guardian
• ** Fundraiser to help Mauritian oil spill clean-up **
• "Before and after: Satellite images show how lightning complex fires scarred Bay Area landscape" article in The Mercury News
• "A California fire sparked by a gender reveal party has grown to more than 10,000 acres," an article for CNN. Because we definitely needed another reason to hate gender reveal parties, am I right?
• ** Donate to Latino Community Foundation's Northern California Wildfires Relief Fund **

The Sound of Waves Breaking: "Ay Ay Lolo" by Menwar Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz

In this episode, I spoke with poet kiki nicole about their manuscript, Autobiography of the boi Venus which not published (yet!), their embroidery work, film work, and current interests.

kiki nicole is a Black, Queer, and Non-binary multimedia artist and poet based in Charlotte, North Carolina.. They've received invitations to fellowships such as Pink Door Writing Retreat, The Watering Hole, and Winter Tangerine. kiki nicole is currently a reader for Muzzle Magazine. They work to explore a Black, queer, femme & genderless universe that un/bodies, un/genders, & re/news, kiki hopes to lend a voice for the void in which Black femmes not only exist in plain view, but thrive.

kiki's site

kiki's instagram

Donation link to support kiki

Media, artists, books, etc mentioned in this episode:

• Winter Tangerine's fellowship program

• jayy dodd

• venus selenite

• Tyrell Blacquemoss (TBN), who runs Cause Reign

• Find examples of kiki's textile and multimedia work here

• ariella tai

• ariella tai's "she's not going to get more dead"

• the first + the last, a experimental film/video and new media arts project for Black femmes, women, and non-men that kiki and ariella co-curate

• Lil Uzi Vert

• Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

• "Stitches in Time" quilt exhibition, was not at the museum

• M. Norbese Philips's Zong!

• Yoruba deity Oshun

• Yoruba deity Yemaya

• Yoruba deity Shango

• Roman deity Venus

• Gríma Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings

• Shakespeare's Macbeth

• Toni Morrison's Beloved

• Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Kindred

• Naked and Afraid reality series

• Xandria Phillips's HULL

• adrienne marie brown's Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)

• Big Thief's "Not"

• Mitski

• noname's "Song 33"

• Noname Book Club

• Oluwatoyin "Toyin" Salau

• kiki's syllabus "Into a New Year." kiki notes "This is a syllabus of mine that I think ties a lot into what I was trying to convey near the end about preparing for a new world."

• kiki's pdf library "blk thots~" to decolonize your bookshelves!

The sound of waves breaking is Sylvester's "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)."

This episode was edited and social media managed by Mitchel Davidovitz.

Stay safe, everyone!!

Như and I discussed her recent chapbook A System of Satellites and her writing practice, finding dignity as a trans poet, and writing past ingrained fear and doubt. She also asked me questions. Hear me stumble trying to answer questions about my writing practice and how I approach writing with personal experiences.

Như Xuân Nguyễn is a queer and trans Vietnamese American poet and writer. A Kundiman Fellow and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, she won the 2018 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship with her debut chapbook A System of Satellites. Her work has appeared in The Offing, DELUGE (Radioactive Moat), The Journal, The Shade Journal, and Juked. She is currently based in New York City, where she lives with her two cats, Arya and Azula.

Như's website Buy Như's chapbook Note: I refer to a NOLA poetry fest panel that is no longer happening due to COVID-19. Wash your hands and stay at home, everyone. People and Books Mentioned:

• Adrian Matejka
• Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings
• Tracy May Fuad
• Emily Luan

Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz The Sound of Waves Breaking: Lunar Wind, @Walter_Odington

This episode, I got to talk with sung! sung is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Korea. They are the author of What About the Rest of Your Life (Perfect Day Publishing) and Flowers Are for Pussies (Ghost City Press). Their work has appeared in Nat. Brut, Kweli Journal, Contrary, The James Franco Review, The Wanderer, and Crab Fat Magazine. Media, artists, books, etc mentioned in this episode:

• sung's website
• sung's Twitter
• Kaveh Akbar bag of dirt tweet
• Jamie Berrout's essays against publishing
• Interview with Kaveh Akbar where he discusses "Poems are rarely on the side of power."
• Not mentioned in the episode, but looks interesting to read (and it's free online!) on the subject of trauma and how our culture makes it a commodity: Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism
• Paintbucket
• "To eat the fruit climb the tree" poem
• Black Orpheus soundtrack
• Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
• "On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck" by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
• Kendra Allen's When You Learn the Alphabet

The sound of waves breaking is "Wynd" by weerm This episode's editor and social media manager is Mitchel Davidovitz

In this episode, I had the opportunity to talk with Zefyr Lisowski about her book Blood Box.

Zefyr Lisowski is a trans and queer writer, artist, and North Carolinian currently living in NYC. She's a Poetry Co-editor for Apogee Journal and the author of Blood Box, winner of the Black River Editor's Choice Award from Black Lawrence Press and forthcoming fall 2019; she's also the author of the microchap Wolf Inventory (Ghost City Press, 2018) and is a 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow. Zefyr's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Nat. Brut., Muzzle Magazine, and DIAGRAM, among many other places; she's also received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts, McGill University, the New York Live Ideas Fest, and the 2019 CUNY Graduate Center Adjunct Incubator Grant for the arts. A 2018 nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she also goes by Zef.

Zefyr Lisowski's website Go buy Blood Box!

Media, artists, books, etc mentioned in this episode:

• Sharon Pollock's play Blood Relations
• Angela Davis's short story "The Fall River Axe Murders"
• Angela Davis's Bloody Chamber
• Lizzie Borden's film Born in Flames
• Lizzie (2018 film)
• Muriel Leung
• Joey De Jesus
• Jessie Rice Evans
• Cyree Jarelle Johnson's SLINGSHOT (and here's my interview with Cyree)
• Diana Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of
• Johanna Hedva's "Sick Woman Theory"
• @Mx_ctrl is my Instagram handle, and...I definitely failed Inktober
• Samuel Ace/ Linda Smukler's Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don't wash.

Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz Sound of Waves Breaking is "Cicada Single" by Jedo.

This episode, I had the chance to speak with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson about their book, SLINGSHOT.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (He/They) is a poet and writer from Piscataway, NJ. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Wussy, The Wanderer, Vice, Rewire News, The Root, and Nat. Brut among other publications. They earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University with support from Davis Putter Scholarship Fund.

SLINGSHOT, his first collection of poetry, is available now from Nightboat Books. Development of the work was supported by Astraea Foundations' Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, and Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship.

They tweet with significant queer millenial ennui at @CyreeJarelle

Cyrée's website Cyrée's TED Talk "What is Autism Neutrality?"

Authors and books mentioned in the episode:

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Tonguebreaker and Care Work
• Kay Undlay Barrett's When the Chant Comes
• Britteney Black Rose Kapri's Black Queer Hoe
• Yanyi's Year of Blue Water

The Sound of Waves Breaking was "Natural Disaster" by @davidthomascairns

Editor, Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz Host, Producer: Avren Keating

It's been a minute! Thanks for your patience as I've slogged through life. In this episode I spoke with Samuel Ace about his book Our Weather Our Sea.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), the newly re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don't wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.

Sam's website

Buy Our Weather Our Sea

Also buy Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don't wash.

Books, poets, artists, etc mentioned in this episode:

• Ari Banias
• Oliver Baez Bendorf
• TC Tolbert's "Dear Melissa"
• j/j hastain
• Julie Carr's Real Life: An Installation
• Ronaldo Wilson's Lucy 72
• Douglas Kearney's Mess and Mess and
• M. NourbeSe Philip's ZONG!
• Ching-In Chen's recombinant
• Sawako Nakayasu's Mouth Eats Color
• Harmony Holiday a reading from 2015
• LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs's Twerk
• Caroline Bergvall's sound installations
• Cecilia Vicuña's New and Selected Poems Saborami (Chainlinks)
• Tracie Morris two poems
• Andrea Abi-Karam's EXTRATRANSMISSION
• Orlando White LETTERRS
• Maureen Seaton
• Rickey Laurentiis
• Philip B. Williams
• Ocean Vuong
• Farid Matuk
• Kaveh Akbar
• Angel Dominguez's D E S G R A C I A D O
• Ariana Reines's A Sand Book
• Trace Peterson's Since I Moved In
• Go listen to my interview with Roy over at the Marxist Poetry Podcast

The Sound of Waves Breaking: Samuel Ace's "These Nights" Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz

I had the opportunity to talk with S. Brook Corfman at AWP this year! S. Brook Corfman is the author of Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and two chapbooks: the letterpress Meteorites from DoubleCross Press and the digital collection of performance pieces The Anima from GaussPDF. The recipient of grants and fellowships from Lambda Literary, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, recent work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, Muzzle, The Offing, Territory, and Quarterly West (Best of the Net Nomination), among other places. Born and raised in Chicago, Sam now lives in a turret in Pittsburgh.

S's website

Luxury, Blue Lace

Meteorites (chapbook)

Writers, topics, etc, mentioned in the show:

• Collection of essays on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and why it's bad science

• I should not be surprised someone wrote a thinkpiece on The Little Mermaid as transgender figure

• Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice

  • A review of the version S. saw in Chicago

• Dawn Lundy Martin

  • S recommends Discipline

• Mei Mei Berssenbrugge

This episode's Editor and Social Media Manager is Mitchel Davidovitz

The Sound of Waves Breaking is a field recording of kids playing at a park during the day by JohnnyBeCrafty

Hello, hello! Happy Spring! I'm here with another interview for you fine people. I had the opportunity to interview B'ellana Johannx aka Chloe Rose about their two upcoming chapbooks!

B'ellana Johannx's gender is Rilke's dark god: a webbed scrim made of a thousand roots drinking in silence. Also known as Chloe Rose, she/they are a fat, queer, femme, non-binary womxn-of-color living with disabilities and their cats Franz and Pepper in Tacoma, WA. Rose/Johannx has been published in The Wanderer, Dream Pop, and Aspasiology, with Pushcart and Bettering American Poetry nominations henny, so watch out! Tweet them about conlangs, antifa, witchcraft, and drag names @llanaandsuchas. If you are a faggot, you are her/their kin and they love you. May the peace of the Goddess and God be upon you. #SMIB

B'ellana's website

B'ellana's Twitter

Writers, books, ideas, musicians mentioned:

• BBC News reporting on Fatbergs
• Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications by José Esteban Muñoz
• Raquel Salas Rivera
• Kolby Harvey
• In a Queer Time and Place by Jack Halberstam
• blackbox of butterfly goo
• Never Angeline Nørth, aka , aka Møss Høpe Ångel, fka Moss Angel the Undying, fka Moss Angel Witchmonstr, fka Sara June Woods, fka Sara Woods
• Infancy Gospel of Thomas
• Epimemetics / cultural mimetics: This Wired article from the 90s and also the more contemporary: Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, "Communist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagination" coming soon as part of this anthology
• Beast Meridian
• while they sleep (under the bed another country) by Raquel Salas Rivera
• Cruel Fiction by Wendy Trevino
• Big Lucks
• Dream Pop
• Femmescapes zine
• The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell
• Sea-Witch by Never Angeline North
• Lizzo
• listicle about BLACKPINK

"The Sound of Waves Breaking" is titled "Ghost Merkel Beat" by stanrams and made me laugh my ass off.

This episode was edited and media managed by Mitchel Davidovitz