Amanda Paradise
Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CA Conrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious." The poems in AMANDA PARADISE reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Coronavirus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.
Poetry.
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CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE, forthcoming from Wave Books in 2021. Their book While Standing in Line for Death won a Lambda Literary Award. They also received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please view their books, essays, recordings, and upcoming events at bit.ly/88CAConrad.
CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.
--Eileen Myles
At a time when I don't always know how to make sense of what's going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer.
--Jillian Steinhauer, New York Times
