By CAConrad
Publication Date: April 1, 2012

ISBN# 9781933517599 (8x7.10 240pp, paper and cloth)

Description
Reviews
Bio

this mechanistic world…has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry

Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.
The world gives us cops and cops and cops and cops and cops, but CAConrad gives us Breton-trumping anarcho-lyric behavior and l’amo[u]r mundi fou.
Anne Boyer

The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form—they both invent a new genre and help increase freedom from the double tyrannies of both the tired narrative form and short, personal lyric form. Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory.
Sean Singer, The Rumpus

Conrad’s now-discursive, now-fragmentary poetry offers us a mirror we may hold up to ourselves, if only we dare; eccentric, insistent, passionate, and indubitably wide-eyed, it also reflects those precious human traits we too often leave by the wayside on our dreary, unprofitable, and finally destructive searches for well-assimilated lives and loves.
Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
CAConrad's new book is a strange and wondrous collection of texts. Physically and emotionally intimate, by turns vulnerable, outrageous, and hilarious, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon asks that we seriously consider the power of poetry as a lived and embodied practice.
Abraham Avnisan, Rain Taxi

It’s a book for people, I should say. Everyone can be found and find in it. When I go through the work, I like to think of Conrad as more of a guide than an author. He’s there working with you and for you. I like that—it’s a caring there. It made me happy.
Tom Trudgeon, HTMLGiant

If the motto of the Situationists, with whom Conrad has much in common, was “Be realistic—demand the impossible!”, then a suggested motto for those wishing to proceed in the spirit of Conrad might be, “Be reasonable—do what is insane!” Conrad’s most recent book of poems, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is a guide to practical insanity.
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Exit Strada
CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.

Literary Criticism/Essay

Search

Social

Links

Newsletter

Contact