Additional information
by Laura Elrick (Author)
What This Breathing is a poetic experience that journeys across opacities in the lived underside of the hetero-patriarchal organization of social life. It searches for a language through which to reimagine relation: to the past, to other people, to self, to historical and ecological time, and to futurity in an age when the daily, even hourly, accretions of systemic violence render the present a seemingly endless end in itself. Weaving together multiple temporal and representational perspectives, the collection traverses what is inherited, what is overdetermined by layers of overt generational erasure and the repetition of simplified scripts. Its interruptions and aporias are a form of truth-telling, though they cannot be read (really) as a narrative account of events. Rather, what emerges is a commitment to what remains open to reinterpretations, to retellings that will change the story.
Author Biography
Laura Elrick is a poet, essayist, educator, and performance writer based in Brooklyn, NY, where she is Associate Professor of Writing at Pratt Institute. Previous works include Propagation (Kenning Editions, 2012), Fantasies in Permeable Structures(Factory School, 2005), and Skincerity (Krupskaya Books, 2003), as well as the trans-media performances Stalk (2008) and Blocks Away (2010). Her work has appeared in the anthologies Viz. Interarts: Interventions and The Eco Language Reader, as well as in numerous journals including Bomb, Mandorla, The Brooklyn Rail, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, LINE, and Aufgabe.
