CAConrad 'Listen to the Goldern Boomerang Return'

Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Breathing, moving, living on the page, CAConrad's exhilarating work is centred on the (Soma)tic ritual, their celebrated practice which draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an 'extreme present' of unfettered creativity from which poems can emerge.
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return gathers the results of a single new ritual, focused on fellow animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, and spanning environments from Seattle - a city built in the midst of an abundant nontropical rainforest - to the Mojave Desert. The poet receives gifts from a crow; associates different parts of their body with nine different species encountered in the desert; and joins a woman each morning in feeding rats in the streets of Rome, taking turns looking out for the police.
Written with urgency, hope, anger and joy, the poems that result are an ode to survival in a world that humanity has poisoned, and a testament to a love that knows no by-laws.

CAConrad

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis.

They received the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Book Award. Their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. They currently live in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and will teach at UMass, Amherst, in the MFA creative writing program from fall 2022 to spring 2023. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

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