Tuesday, August 7, 2018 Speak Easy: Nina Vega-Westhoff Categories: Other Local Events Timelines: 1b: Past Events (Unseen Archive), 4: Christina Vega-Westhoff Workshops & Events

Where:
Buffalo Distilling
860 Seneca St
Buffalo, NY 14210
Date: August 15, 2018
Time: 7:00 p.m.

A reading & release party for Christina Vega-Westhoff’s “Suleo Tide Cement” (Nightboat Books).

Winner of the 2017 Nightboat Prize for Poetry

Suelo Tide Cement began at a residency in Panama that brought together artists, scientists, activists, and community members to learn from and create with soil. Written serially in the midst of a development boom, the poem performs a compostual incantation, moving like water or bodies in a dance as it investigates questions of language, health, economy, and empire. Fragments make lyrics make a narrative make an epic. In its search for a meeting point between personal and geologic experiences, one is never sure whether the poem takes place in the flash of a second or whether whole eons of planetary time are tectonically drifting.

Fragments make lyrics make a narrative make an epic. Suelo Tide Cement is a path-breaking book that must invent its own language, its own form, its own approach to poetry in order to come into an off-centered world.—KAZIM ALI

In soil, tide, and cement, Vega-Westhoff brings to life the decompositions that define the soul in the cosmologies of capitalism, as well the older rites by which a poet might trip up a cosmology in its own contradictions.—EDGAR GARCIA

Suelo Tide Cement is a beautiful earthworks meditation, a precise choreography, an offering embroidered with urgency and profound care.—LAYNIE BROWNE