Project Hope, Publications, Upcoming Readings, more!
Pain Baby's been a busy bee
When I first started writing this newsletter, I didn’t know it was mostly going to be about hope. I didn’t realize that writing about pain is secretly always writing about hope. Everything about living with chronic pain in general, and certainly in this historical moment, is all about probing how hope works. Spending one’s days cracking the thousands of codes—half of which we built ourselves—to living both in the present and with light toward futurity. Despite. Around For. It stands to reason that hope has become my central spiritual and academic obsession. It’s also because I’m bad at it. One of the things that most fucks with my hope is that the inner workings of our particular dystopia are designed to be dull, so insidious as to be gray, faceless, but not even bothering to hide. It chooses to look like Agent Smith. It’s why so much dystopian sci-fi appeals to me; it offers alternative apocalypses to the banality of our evils or validates how appalling it is. I digress.
Historically, the disabled have been ostracized, kept from view, and deemed insufficient for ordinary, productive social and public value. The fear, shame, and discomfort we cause in the able-bodied reveals how alive this legacy remains even in our more accessibility-aware moment. A mass-disabling event like COVID-19 will do that for discourse, but we are still struggling significantly with policy. Caring about folks with disability and chronic illnesses is only ever lip service without fundamentally disentangling a person’s worth from their productivity as labor.
The CDC has now stopped requiring people infected with COVID-19 to remain home for five days or until they no longer test positive for the virus. Fewer and fewer places require masks, and people are much less vigilant about how and where they wear them. These are all choices made to favor the economy over public health, the workings of which were laid bare by how we treated essential workers during the lockdown years. This article breaks it down well, though it stops short, understandably, of stating that the reason vulnerable groups might be angered by this decision is because we know it threatens lives, our lives, and puts a lot of other people at risk of experiencing things we live every day, and do not wish on any more people. This country does not have a strong track record of acknowledging and caring for what doesn’t suit its narrative. I am part of a new class of chronically ill and disabled person whose nervous system was rewired by COVID-19, and who were already on the margins at several of their intersections.
I’m learning it’s a rather specific perspective. We have a shared inability to consistently drink the Cool-Aid to keep the wheels turning. We’re also constantly self-flagellating about the inability to drink it, or the inability to pretend to. The narrative of insufficiency leaks into the fray even when we start from the premise that it’s false. This tension is sometimes more arduous than all the medical struggles combined.
There are still no routine public or shared practices of mourning. We used to be so terrified we were irrationally hoarding toilet paper, and now the need to slap on a cheap facade to keep going runs so deep that it’s faux pas to acknowledge that we’re still in the process of surviving. It’s being a killjoy. I take no joy in realizing that there are still hospitalized people and that, increasingly, more people with long-term complications from infection. The deep pandemic devastated the most economically vulnerable, and we are now punishing the same communities further by stopping all economic pandemic support. Instead of putting our tax money toward public health and social support networks or basic infrastructure, we’re funding a genocide whose greatest victims are children. In New York at present, one in four children lives in poverty. No matter what the speed of the violence, the victims are children. I don’t remember feeling this kind of daily anguish before, and I can’t see these forces outside of their enmeshment. The rot underneath is the same.
To think seriously about hope, I had to expand my search outside myself and my books. I’ve started to ask around.
My friends are talking to me about hope as a colonial construct. Hope as a neoliberal capitalist fiction. Hope as a necessary affective force for continuity. A notion with complex relationships to ambition, fantasy, achievement, cruel optimism, and liberation dreams, and sexuality. A genre of romance. A romantic genre. Optimism as performative, as pathology, as Midwestern affectation. I’m fascinated and want more. I encourage you to comment below about what hope means for you, what shape it has in your body, and what gives it its juice. What fed your hope today? How do you feed your hope? What have you read/ watched/ listened to that made you think about hope? Every conversation so far has at its core something just as hard to define, and arguably synonymous: love. Communities, friends, the life of our day-to-day streets, family, chosen kin, children, non-human familiars, wild urban flora and fauna, art, poetry, and the people with whom we fall madly in love, even through all this. It sounds obvious, but it doesn’t always feel obvious. Rehearsing it matters. I remember being taught by an Irish socialist nun, an educator at my high school, that hope as practice and praxis is learning how to live with marrow-deep conviction that we are “one another’s charge, one another’s blessing, one another’s sacred call.” I still hear those words in her voice as I write them. Today, I’m turning that memory around in my fingers like a pendant on my childhood’s chain. Thank you for joining me.
PUBLICATIONS, READINGS, RECOMMENDATIONS!
I have a poem in Wild-Wired!
Brilliant poet-scholar heidi andrea restrepo rhodes curates a folio called Wild-Wired by ANMLY/Anomalous Press exploring neuroqueerness, an orientation toward non-normativity that works to undo the underpinning assumptions of abelism and heteronormativity to reframe how atypical neurologies and beinghoods move in the world with their own poetics. My poem, “Coping Mechanisms” is an ode to the kind of gallows humor and grief-stricken camaraderie shared between people who make themselves vulnerable to one another in the wake of surviving major medical trauma. This poem removes all judgment from the behaviors that come from that trauma and celebrates, if darkly, that there is love there, of a kind, even amidst all that sorrow. I am so grateful to heidi not only for her inclusion of this poem, but for her generous, sharp, and probing analysis of it in the context of cruel optimism, disability justice, and fugitive survivals. Read her essay and my poem here.
The Poetry Project 50th New Year’s Day Marathon recording is now available online
I had the honor of reading for The Poetry Project’s 50th New Year’s Day Marathon this New Year’s Day, and read an early draft of one of my favorite recent poems, “Horoscope.” Luckily, The Poetry Project recorded many of our readings and they now exist online as part of a crucial archive that documents the tenor of our time. This is a treasure trove of extraordinary, unexpected, new, old, classic, experimental, musical, technical, and otherwise wild poetry and performance from across the nation and the world. I urge you strongly to dip in and out of the hours available over the course of your day, but if its just me you’re looking for, I read 15:00-17:50 in the video below.
FOUR Upcoming Readings!
folded horizon/ an evening of poetry | Anamot Press x Bluestockings Cooperative
Thursday, February 29, 6pm-8pm ET | 116 Suffolk St., New York, NY
London-based independent queer press Anamot Press is co-hosting a reading with activist center and feminist bookstore Bluestockings in celebration of andriniki mattis’ debut collection, Quite Fires featuring mattis, Jee Leong Koh, my dreamboat friend Kamelya Youssef, and me! Come for the poetry, stay for the astonishing curation of books and Bluestockings’ iconic sweet vibes.
Priyo@Parlay
Save the Date: March 10th, 4:00 PM- 6:30 PM ET
Parlay, 4024 8th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232
The extraordinary artist, musician, puppet-maker, actor, dramaturge, and fellow third culture kid Sean Devare and I have been in conversation about diasporic art spaces and the importance of small, intimate opportunities for kinship and creative connection. When I was very young, my parents and their South Asian diasporic community in Italy would choose a household, remove all the furniture from the living room, make one side of the room the stage, cover the floors in white sheets and throw pillows, and perform for one another. Guests brought tablas, roast chickens, ektaras, curries, microphones, sweets, and sitars. Over the course of the night, guests shared poetry, music, dance routines, and random monologues. Families were made and remade within this intimacy against a hostile world. There are many words for this across cultures, though SWANA communities often default to the Persian and Urdu term, “Mefhil.” It was with this vision in mind that Sean allowed me to rope him into co-curating a reading and performance series featuring poets, writers, musicians, actors, puppets, and other makers at a gorgeous Sunset Park cafe and restaurant, Parlay, run by artist and educator Tams. Tams’ commitment and enthusiasm for local community building and cross-breeding artistic worlds makes Parlay the perfect home for a series we’re calling Priyo.
In Bengali, priyo means dear or beloved, favorite, precious. I wanted to create a series committed to supporting and uplifting local artistic community and immigrant-run businesses that feels precious, by beloveds for beloveds, that combined the genius and love of poetry, music, theater, and performance more broadly, where we also tuck into some deliciousness, in this case, bowls of curry. And folks, you gotta try the curry at Parlay.
The inaugural Priyo@Parlay is on Sunday, March 10th, 4pm-6:30pm. Ring Daylight Savings Time in by being awash in poetry, music, and warm early spring light!
Stay tuned for our lineup announcement on and Instagram and ticket links.
Not Sorry: A Night of Poetry for Reproductive Justice
Gingers Bar, 363 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY | March 10, 7:30 p.m. ET
Wait, Ashna, isn’t that the same day as the kickoff of Priyo? It is the same day, but you are strongly encouraged to support intimate community arts in Sunset Park and then call your friends to ask them to gather with you in greater numbers the same evening to support reproductive justice at the launch party for the first abobo zine, a poetry zine celebrating and affirming the right to bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. The Alabaman Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are children, halting IVF procedures now considered too legally dangerous to follow through with. We are criminalizing every aspect of our sexual autonomy. Though most of the stories of heartbreak recounted in the media focus on heterosexual couples, IVF is a crucial tool for queer folks to grow their families. All proceeds from this reading, where I am joined by Dylan Gilbert, John Ling, Camila Valle, Nikki Blazek, Aristide Kirby, and Viva Ruiz will go to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Ginger’s Bar is now one of 23 remaining lesbian bars in the United States, and they need our love and support. Let’s turn the fuck out.
Launch Party for Dead End, Issue Two: Abundance
117 9th St, Brooklyn, NY | 7:00pm - 10:00pm ET
I had the pleasure of encountering the force that is Hunter Hodkinson at Brooklyn Poets, and have been enraptured by his ability to conjure beauty, queer magic, and comfort just by being in the room. I am very grateful to have a favorite poem of mine, and certainly the sweetest of my pandemic poems, forthcoming in the second issue of Hunter’s powerful zine, Dead End. Join us for the issue launch party and open mic! If you’re lucky, you might catch me and Hunter arguing the semiotics of glitter. (Not joking.)
Recommended Listen:
Atlantic Radio: “Fatigue Can Wreck You (Redux)”
One of the things that’s giving me some gratitude is the clarity and compassion in the Atlantic Radio episode, “Fatigue Can Wreck You (Redux)” about the most common medical consequences of long-COVID in the form of myalgic encephalomyalitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a form of dysautonomia. These are my exact long-COVID diagnoses, and for once, I felt well represented by two people who speak from a squarely able-bodied place. If you can spare thirty minutes to get a clear view of what may be going on with you or people you know experiencing long-COVID, I strongly recommend taking the time.
Cool Things My Friends Are Up To:
”Pillars,” A Dance Film by Ishita Milli and Amit Patel
“Pillars” is one of the dance films featured at KINETIC, IMGE Dance’s dance film festival in January. A collaboration between IMGE’s Ishita Mili and West Coast dancer Amit Patel, it interrogates the sweetness and confusion of our early cultural relationships with sacred space and ritual. It’s gorgeous. Check these brilliant badasses out and see if they don’t make you wanna dance:
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’ chapbook, ephemeral, is available for preorder!
I know few thinkers as expansive and flexible as heidi, and I’m deeply excited that her long meditation on the world of plants and our entanglement with nature is out now from EcoTheo Collective. This chapbook of poems won the 2022 Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize, and is presented in a bilingual edition with Spanish translations by Alexandra Lytton Regalado and Rocío Bolaños, and is sure to knock off your socks and have you singing to your plant babies. Preorder here.
Even more exciting news and further details soon. Until next time, beloveds.