Join us for an evening with Eleni Stecopoulos, who will speak about her new book of essays, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. A conversation with Brian Teare will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: In the era of the "chronic acute" long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing-its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art's treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.'s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.
About the Author: A poet, essayist, and critic, Eleni Stecopoulos frequently writes on literature in relation to history, medicine, (auto)ethnography, ecology, and social and cultural resistance. Her wide-ranging book of essays, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, is out from Nightboat this fall. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a work of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called "a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves"; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called "riveting…rare beauties." After years of teaching at the University of San Francisco and Bard College, she now works with nonfiction writers and poets as an independent editor in the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the Moderator: A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An associate professor of poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
