L.A. Book Launch: The Long Now Conditions Permit by Jami Macarty

Beyond Baroque welcomes Tucson-based poet, Jami Macarty in celebration of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize.

With ethical attention, Jami Macarty’s collection engages the political, ecological, and personal forces that shape and mark our lives, offering an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Each poem meditates on power, insists on articulating what is being lost—and what must be saved and reclaimed.

The poet will read alongside Karen Kevorkian, Crystal AC Salas, and Margarita Pintado Burgos. Book signings and reception to follow.

Praise for The Long Now Conditions Permit

"Jami Macarty’s spectacular The Long Now Conditions Permit reveals a complex geography of gendered histories and unveiled violences through history and nature. Her poems are rendered in conditions where power circulates as moving, internal portraits and through Steinian-like modes of repetition where description begs the juridical, form weds content in Macarty’s deft sonic registers.”
—Ronaldo V. Wilson, Test Site Poetry Advisory Board, author of Virgil Kills: Stories and Poems of the Black Object

About the authors

Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize, The Minuses, winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award-Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe, finalist for the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award, and Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Macarty’s writing is supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council, and the generous editors of American and Canadian literary magazines such as Colorado Review, Interim, Seneca Review, Vallum, and Volt. Macarty supports other writers as an independent mentor, editor, and reviewer, and as a creative writing teacher at Simon Fraser University. Macarty lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Karen Kevorkian is a native of San Antonio who moved to San Francisco but detoured to the east coast before returning to California and working as an editor for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, teaching poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA, and before that at the University of Virginia. Here in My Body It Feels Crowded is her fourth poetry collection. Her poems are recently published in New American Writing, Volt, Four Way Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, and many other journals. She has been awarded fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Ucross Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. In Los Angeles she was a board member for seven years of Beyond Baroque literary arts center and is a founding member of the Glass Table Collective, publisher of What Books Press.

Crystal AC Salas is a Xicanx poet, essayist, educator, and community organizer. Her poetry chapbook Grief Logic is co-winner of the inaugural Alta California Prize, from Gunpowder Press. She has work in Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Alta Journal, Northwest Review, [PANK] Magazine, World Literature Today, Chaparral Poetry, Acentos Review, and others. A founding member of the BreakBread Literacy Project, which elevates the voices of young creatives under 25, she serves as poetry editor for BreakBread Magazine. She holds an M.F.A. from University of California, Riverside and is the recipient of a 2021-2022 California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Fellowship.

About Beyond Baroque

is one of the United States' leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public's knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

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