Standing Still in a Ring of Horses
Last Friday, the group show “Staring at the Stars and Wishing to Be Somewhere Else” opened at BARAZANI in Berlin. Thank you to everyone who came and filled the space with your warmth, insight, and curiosity.
The exhibition is a critical meditation on inherited mythologies of home. What is home to the dispossessed? What do we make of the ruins and our longings for them? These questions have thrummed though my own artistic research, particularly as I journey to and from my family’s village in Latvia. Our stolen home still stands on Rigas Iela, inhabited now by Latvians. Past and present—I pull taut the rope.
As part of the exhibition, I showed two typographic prints and performed my poems. I’m including a few photographs from opening night, courtesy of Anya Stavrianidi.
These days, I feel that I stand perfectly fixed in a circling ring of horses. I dizzify in a swirling mass of dust, fur, and hair. Pace impossible to comprehend. My eyes hunt the sun’s slinking shadows while around me, the hoof bones beat. God, can you hear me? Pounding thud and still.
At the end of March, I will return to Lublin, Poland, to finish the final works for my exhibition this Summer. My holy pilgrimage to putrefied past. Clip clop the bruised sky of night.
R E A D I N G S
Star-Magic by Richard Butler Glaenzer (poem)
First Snow by Aria Aber (poem)
To a Young Poet by Zaina Alsous (poem)
Cruel Images by Oraib Toukan (essay)
H A P P E N I N G S
All Saints Poetry Hour airs live March 13th at 14h CET / 08h EST. You can tune in via Refuge Worldwide.
My dear friend Chad will be reading on Saturday, March 1st at AGIT alongside Ayaz Muratoglu and Zahra Rashid.
For those in Brooklyn, New York, the poet Sylee Gore is launching her chapbook “Maximum Summer” at Unnameable Books on March 21st. A long-time poet friend, Sylee’s work is absolutely marvelous in its intricate attention to light and surface. I can’t wait to hold her book in my hands! Event information can be found here.