Canadian Launch for Ariel Resnikoff’s Unnatural Bird Migrator:
A poetry reading and discussion of translingual Jewish poetics with Adeena Karasick, introduced and moderated by Charles Bernstein
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
5PM EST / 2PM PST
Please join us virtually to celebrate the publication of Ariel Resnikoff’s debut poetry collection Unnatural Bird Migrator, published by The Operating System in December 2020.
Resnikoff’s poetry accompanies his work as translator and scholar in its exploration of the spectral crossings and migratory resonances of Ashkenazi Jewish diasporic poetics. As erica kaufman writes: “Ariel Resnikoff creates a midrashic translingual poetics that joins ancestral echoes with contemporary lyric, where inherited speech is never without questioning or transgressions . . . Unnatural Bird Migrator excavates the gaps between languages (Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Aramaic-, Akkadian- Englishes) so that ‘we are disoriented, finally,’ able to see poem as ‘perpetual displacement’ incantatory in all the best ways.”
Poet, performance artist, and essayist Adeena Karasick will read alongside Ariel. Charles Bernstein will introduce and moderate the readings and a subsequent discussion of translingual Jewish poetics and radical secular practice.
The event will be hosted by Concordia University’s Center for Expanded Poetics.
**To receive the Zoom invitation for this event, please email stephen.ross@concordia.ca. Invitations will be sent out on the morning of the event.**
You may purchase Ariel Resnikoff’s Unnatural Bird Migrator through Indiebound and Bookshop. The book is also available for download on a pay-what-you-want sliding scale (including for free) at the OS's Open Access Library. Adeena Karasick’s books of poetry, including her most recent Checking In (2018), may be purchased from Talon Books.
Speakers
Ariel Resnikoff is the author of Unnatural Bird Migrator (Operating System 2020) and the chapbooks Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (Operating System 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and Between Shades (Materialist Press 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish, German and Hebrew, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Protocols, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry, Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur and Boundary2. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions, and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual-Hebrew poet, Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, co-published by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is currently a Fulbright Postdoctoral US Scholar.
Adeena Karasick is a New York-based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin), “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She received her PhD from Concordia University in 1997 and teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Charles Bernstein’s recent books of poetry include Near/Miss (2018) Recalculating (2013), All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010), and Girly Man (Chicago, 2006). A new collection, Topsy Turvy, will appear in April 2021. He has published five collections of essays, including Pitch of Poetry (2016) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011). His libretto Shadowtime, for composer Brian Ferneyhough, was published in 2005 by Green Integer; it was performed as part of the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival. Bernstein is the editor of several collections, including: American Poetry after 1975 (Duke University Press / special issue of boundary, 2009), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1999), The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (Roof, 1990), and the poetics magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose first issue was published in 1978. He is editor of the Electronic Poetry Center and co-director (with Al Flireis) of PennSound.