Launch for Eggs in the Basement this Friday!

Please join Nomados for a poetry reading and book launch with Kim Duff and Larissa Lai at 7:30 on Friday May 8 at 1067 Granville Street, alley entrance. BYOB

Kim Duff is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and a researcher of avant-garde poetry and global spatial logic. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary British literature, particularly literature that engages with Thatcherism, privitization and urban spatial theory. She’ll be reading from her recently published book of poetry, Tube Sock Army, LINEbooks.

“Everyone in the Tube Sock Army can hear technology building its architectures in the voice. And Kim Duff tracks the provocations of this ‘neoliberal domesticity project’ as it gets us to whisper our passwords into our cell phones ‘softly.’ So much for disembodiment. In the intimacy afforded by 30-second intervals, we relax, texting ourselves the grocery list. ‘Truthiness’ breaks down our globalized front doors (the apartment keeps shrinking, but the rent goes up). Nevertheless, it’s in the interstices of these spatializing mediations that we keep vying (hope-full) for contact. This is ‘creature address.’ Hallo:” — Laura Elrick

Larissa Lai, acclaimed author of Salt Fish Girl, When Fox Is a Thousand and [with Rita Wong] Sybil Unrest, launches her Nomados chapbook Eggs in the Basement. Lai has been the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary (1997-8), and Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University (2006). Shortlisted for three awards, Salt Fish Girl was described by Herizons as “hope in the midst of despair.” The Georgia Straight called it “a well-written and highly inventive novel.”

In Sybil Unrest, “Larissa Lai and Rita Wong . . . find in adulterated adspeak a ticker-tape, twitterpoetry that – because it’s more than 140 characters long – makes meaning out of the meaningless. . . . Sybil Unrest argues that consumerism doesn’t necessarily kill us. . . . It fragments us and puts us back together wrong, galvanised with electrical goods like Shelley’s monster.” — Sophie Mayer, Chroma

Praise for Eggs in the Basement:

Procedure-in-a-round, Eggs in the Basement ticks the metronome of everyday diction through looped words and known notions. Text, repeated, collides and colludes meaning, lyric echoic, fierce. Disjunctive narrative swallows its own tail and births eggs into itself. Dim the light and consume immediately. a.rawlings

Spun from a source text generated in a writing exercise, Eggs in the Basement takes this initial set of linguistic, social, geographical, and political constrictions to recombine into poems that perform the possibilities of expression and affect. In this relationship of limit and possibility, this book (which is so aware of its historical moment) works through the everyday terrains of the social and the poetic. It is a book that travels parallel to the forms of freedom (and their negation through consent and force) that liberal democracy slyly serves up in its language of consent. Jeff Derksen

Eggs in the Basement is a brilliant instance of the contrapuntal improvisation that can occur between writing and thinking. In this long poem Larissa Lai develops these linguistic clefts with such acute awareness and intelligence that each poetic shift triggers a new and surprising message, relentless in an absorption of the cascade of signals at the threshold of potential meaning. Fred Wah