Downloadable Press Kit
Images, Audio & Video Clips, Press Release
Winner 2023 MUSE Creative Award, Book/Publication Design
The MUSE Creative Awards “is an international award that honors creative professionals whose work transcends time, inspires, breaks boundaries, ushers the present to the future.”
Early Praise
“Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, a vivid new graphic-text collaboration by poet-theorist Adeena Karasick and writer-designer Warren Lehrer, has the subtitle, “in the wake of the virus,” marking our distance from lockdown. Return and reawakening register in subtle observations of “opening” so that the earlier closing is implied rather than addressed. We are back in the world, sort-of, through milestones and marked moments in which the concept of “open” carries a variety of meanings.
I have been a fan of Lehrer’s work for decades and was recently introduced to Karasick’s writings through her Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas, one of the few books by someone else I ever wished I had written. This new collaboration by Lehrer and Karasick provides an opportunity to think about the way the design of language transforms and informs a work.
The book is divided into two parts each with its own poem. The first, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, contains seven “openings.” The second poem Touching in the Wake of the Virus, subtitled “A Panddendum” focuses on navigating touch.
Lehrer’s visualization plays with motifs that proliferate in Karasick’s text. Polyglot resonances reflect the global reach of the virus… patterns of sonic effects… air bubbles and exclamations effervesce… erotic play and sexual associations culminate in the corona virus floating through and across the space. Vectors of force and torque instantiate a text that also has edges and conflicts, interruptions and disruptions, and careens towards its final statement.
This collaboration creates a new work, distinctly shaped, strikingly formed, a work worth looking at and reading as—not through—its graphical language. Nothing in the final project feels like a wrong note or mistake. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a vivid book, vibrant and attractive, and handled with suppleness.”
Johanna Drucker, JD: ABCs Newsletter, Substack
“An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page.
In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust deconstruction upon the world, unraveling beliefs and allowing people to see the world with new eyes—whether they want to or not. Karasick’s poems and Lehrer’s images of textual choreography deal with what emerging from a long, isolating quarantine feels like ‘in the today of wild touching; / the today of withholding, the today of / passionate rations.’ …Karasick often uses alliteration and sonic association, using language to represent this slow re-entry—the kinetic chaos of relearning one another. Lehrer makes a performance out of form… forcing the eye to sweep across unpredictable, textured pages when Karasick’s speakers lament their physical alienation… This collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“A striking publication that gives voice (and form) to the challenges, triumphs, interactions and realizations of our post-pandemic world. In this engaging hardback, writer, designer and book artist Warren Lehrer has visually staged powerful lines by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick. Raw emotions and meaning jump off the page in stirring alliterations, capturing observations made throughout the years of lockdowns… The chaos, pain, hope and connections (or absence of) experienced during the pandemic are inescapable in these playful visualisations…. The publication comes to a close with a QR code that links to another collaboration—this time with Grammy-award winning composer and musician Frank London—of powerful recordings, delivered with such fervour by Karasick… Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings demonstrates the crafting of a sensory experience and will interest anyone with an appetite for linguistic and typographic experimentation… ”
Amy Henry Eye Magazine
“A total work of art, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings combines poetry, typographic design, and music as a single unit… The soundtrack of Karasick’s reading of the poems to sound design by composer/performer Frank London allows one to read/view Lehrer’s typography along with the aural presentation. The two poems—“Openings” and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus”—express a re-awakening of body and mind after two years of seclusion. The poems demand a performance and exuberance that matches their look, their puns, alliterations, allusions, and sheer sonority of enunciation… It is a reward for those who have survived and endured—so open the book, touch its surfaces, and enjoy.”
Tom Bowden Book Beat, I Arrogantly Recommend column
“[Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings] is like nothing I’ve seen in recent memory… I wonder why most books don’t look like your book? Why is it such a dark horse? Because what you’re doing is not ‘experimental.’ It’s 21st-century realism… It’s not just that this is a pandemic book. People don’t seem to realize the world in front of them. Because they go about their whole day, they’re texting with their friends, they’re looking at YouTube videos, and then, when they sit down to write, they might as well be sitting there with a quill and a candle. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a 21st-century book. It’s how information flows… A joyful meditation connection to our post-everything world… Laid out in a perfect expression of what the language is doing… gritty… beautiful!”
Bill Lessard Heavy Feather Review
(interview with Karasick & Lehrer)
“Ouvert, Oeuvre: Openings is a work of art, with Adeena Karasick’s poetry beautifully choreographed by Warren Lehrer. It also features a QR code in the back matter granting access to Karasick’s oral performance of the poetry via a SoundCloud link adorned with music by Frank London. The resulting multimedia engagement is a thoroughly provocative social commentary, offering new vectors of experience guiding the reader’s gaze across the orchestrated page, beyond conventional silent reading… granting us a glimpse of our unmediated selves.”
Steven Hicks Fence
“The Covid virus and ensuing chaos is now a touchstone of early 21st-century artistic expression, especially poetry, not the least of which is the dramatic Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings. The poems by Adeena Karasick, a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist, media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics, have been interpreted and typographically visualized by Warren Lehrer, a pioneer of the typographic narrative and poetry movement. Delicately designed and smartly produced—in a smyth-sewn, three-color foil-stamped three-piece hardcover binding—Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and type… and will appeal to anyone trying to find humanity in the wake of pandemics.”
Steven Heller Print Magazine
“Innovative Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings Book Explores Post-Pandemic World… This is the first collaborative book between poet, performer and cultural theorist Karasick and designer/author/vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer who has a track record of producing work which melds books, typography, animation, and performance… The book comes with a soundtrack recording of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.”
Fine Books and Collections
“An artistic collaboration that evokes—through poetry and design—the reopening of the world after Covid-19 shut it down… What captures the imagination in both these poems is the gray areas between opening, but not fully, and touching, but not all the way, and not with confidence… In this book, which comes with an audio soundtrack, the oral and the visual and the printed word all come together.”
NY Public Radio
“A true masterpiece of linguistic play and exploration! Karasick and Lehrer have created an exceptional work that deserves recognition for its innovative approach to language, masterful use of visual and literary techniques, and its contribution to the ongoing conversation about language, media, and culture.”
Paolo Granata, Professor, Book and Media Studies, University of Toronto
“Recommended for all poetry lovers… In Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, words capture the complexity and richness of touch, with its ability to connect us to others, to leave a lasting impression, and bring pleasure and joy… from a reader’s mind and a wardrobe, to the sea and a microphone… Transformative and deeply rewarding.”
Ruchi Agarwal Pegasus Literary
“A book that asks the reader to engage in such original and challenging ways. It’s an absolutely gorgeous reading experience on the page. Then through a QR code in back, you get to experience and read along with the recording of Adeena’s beautiful, trance-like performance. Spectacular!”
Karen Karbiener Director, Walt Whitman Initiative
“Like slowed-down Joyce, with less inscrutable puns but equally high-powered formulas and searing insights, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings deserves our utmost attention. A deftly wrought and groundbreakingly crucial volume.”
Derrick de Kerckhove, author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence
Punning with conceptual condensations until pleasures become fireworks, joyously singing the language dynamic, displaying heartfelt learning, sexy switch-ups and flights of insight, this work is a gasp-worthy balance of poetic eros, theoretical intelligence, and luminous suspicion. An all-round original book, here the sacred, the playful, the Kabbalah and the female are flying high in polymorphous boldness. A hell of a book. Karasick blasts on all her cylinders!
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet-critic
_________
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D., is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin). Other publications include Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink, 2023); Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas (The Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022) Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018); SALOMÉ: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), and CD, (NuJu Records, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute; is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology; Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication; 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient; winner of the Voce Donna Italia Award for her contributions to feminist thinking; winner of 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship (MEA), and 2023 Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Adeena Karasick website
Frank London is a Grammy-award winning composer, trumpeter and innovative force in Jazz, Klezmer, New Music, and World Music. A founding member of The Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, he has performed with John Zorn, LL Cool J, Mel Torme, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, Itzhak Perlman, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, Maurice El Medioni and Gal Costa, and is featured on over 500 records. His projects include the folk-opera A Night in the Old Marketplace; 1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America with Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer; SALOMÉ: Woman of Valor with Adeena Karasick. He was music director for David Byrne and Robert Wilson’s The Knee Plays. His many film scores include John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet and Men With Guns, Yvonne Rainer’s Murder and Murder, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s The Conspiracy.
FALL TOUR SCHEDULE
Wed. Sept. 6, 4:30pm Karasick performs Ærotomania & Openings In Times Square 43rd & Broadway Stage (by big Flag), NYC
Mon. Sept. 11, 7pm Karasick at Bar 718, 718 5th Ave, Boog City Fest, Park Slope, NY
Thurs. Sept. 21, 1:30-2:30pm Walt Whitman Initiative American Love Speaker Series Containing Multitudes: The Visual Literature of Warren Lehrer, with Adeena Karasick, WWI YouTube Channel
Sun. Oct. 1, 6pm (with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright and Heller Levinson) P & T Bookstore Presented by Word Shed NYC, 180 Orchard St. NYC
Fri. Oct. 6, 7pm **** OUVERT OEUVRE: OPENINGS **** BOOK LAUNCH_PARTY **** Karasick/Lehrer, Center for Book Arts Moderated by CBA Director Corina Reynolds, 28 West 27th St. NYC. Admission is free but seating is limited so please register in advance at the link above.
Thurs. Oct. 12 Lehrer presents at AIGA National Conference View from Here, LENS Symposium, Reconsideration of Vis Lit History, Sheraton Time Square, NYC
Fri. Oct. 13 Karasick presents Openings & Ærotomania at New York State Communication Association Annual Conference: Communication in a Digital World, Villa Roma, Catskills, NY.
Thurs. Oct 19, 6pm Maine Writers & Publishers Association Word Literary Festival, Lehrer & Karasick, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine. Also Featured in Word. Art. Exhibition.
Sat. Oct. 28, 2pm Negotiating Deepfakes… as read through Checking In 2, The 71st Annual Institute for General Semantics Symposium, Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park South, NYC
Thurs. Nov. 9, 7pm Karasick with Lehrer, Tolstoy’s Lounge @ The Russian Samovar 256 W. 52nd St, NYC
Sun. Dec. 3, 6pm, Karasick with Lehrer, Torn Page Salon, 435 W. 22nd Ave, NYC
2024 touring schedule includes reading/performances in Australia, Italy, France, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
Stay tuned for more info…
Past pre-launch reading/performances of Ouvert Oeuvre include: Aug 3, Massy Arts, Vancouver, BC; July 22, Le Petit Versaille Garden, NYC; June 25, Annual Media Ecology Association Convention, Fordham U; June 3, Secret Handshake Gallery, Toronto; May 6 & May 20, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY.
Poems written by Adeena Karasick. Book visualized by Warren Lehrer.
Published by Lavender Ink Press. October, 2023.
6.25” x 8” x 96 pages. 3-color foil-stamped, 3-piece Hardcover binding, smythe-sewn,
printed on acid-free, archival paper, black and white interior.
ISBN: 978-1-956921-13-7
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a collaboration between acclaimed poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and designer/author and vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer. Inscribing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might call “espace vital” (the space we can survive), the two poems that embody this work form an ecstatically wrought exploration of re-entering the world after a pandemic that never seems to end.
The title poem and Touching in the Wake of the Virus track trepidations and celebrations of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Both poems explore a range of intralingual etymologies laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. They foreground language and book-space as organisms of hope—highlighting the concept of opening and touching as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
In this first collaborative book, Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page through typographic compositions that give form to the emotional, metaphorical, historical and sonic underpinnings of the texts. His sensuous, textural, textual settings diagram themes within the poems like approach/withdrawal, navigating between and through a landscape of barriers and openings, seeking intimacy, fearing/daring to touch and be touched. Together, the writing and visuals engage the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the work.
The book also comes with a soundtrack recording (via QR code to Soundcloud page) of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.
Exquisitely produced—in a symth-sewn, 3-color foil-stamped, 3-piece hardcover binding, printed on acid-free paper, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is made for lovers of beautiful (yet affordable) books, boundary-pushing poetry, art, design, philosophy, performance, and anyone trying to navigate opening and touching in the wake of pandemics and other mass maladies.
Founded by Bill Lavender in 1995 in New Orleans, Lavender Ink publishes mostly American poetry, fiction and nonfiction, with a mission to change the world through cross-culturally significant literature.
Buy the Book!
Signed Copies from the Authors
Unsigned Copies from the Publisher
Distributed to bookstores by SPD
sample spreads
from Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings
from Touching in the Wake of The Virus
Audio Augmentation/Soundtrack
Audio excerpt of Adeena Karasick performing Touching in the Wake of the Virus, with music by Frank London
Audio excerpt of Adeena Karasick performing Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, with music by Frank London
Adeena Karasick is a high voltage performance poet. Whenever possible, Lehrer accompanies Karasick’s performance/readings of Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings with real-time visual projections. Book Launch events feature this book and excerpts from Karasick’s Aerotomania, which is published simultaneously by Lavender Ink. Events can include conversation/Q&A about the collaboration. Depending on the venue and availability, Frank London will join with live musical accompaniment. Karasick and Lehrer are also available for double bills, each presenting from their respective body of work. They also continue to present individually. For booking, contact Adeena and/or Warren.
Adeena performing the poems at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Video taped live at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, May 20, 2023. Performed by Adeena Karasick, Projections by Warren Lehrer
Offstage, Warren projects images in real time at the New Orleans Poetry Festival
A few in-process photos and side and back cover view
Buy the Book!
Signed Copies from the Authors
Unsigned Copies from the Publisher
Distributed to bookstores by SPD
Downloadable Press Kit
Images, Audio & Video Clips, Press Release
Winner 2023 MUSE Creative Award, Book/Publication Design
The MUSE Creative Awards “is an international award that honors creative professionals whose work transcends time, inspires, breaks boundaries, ushers the present to the future.”
Early Praise
“Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, a vivid new graphic-text collaboration by poet-theorist Adeena Karasick and writer-designer Warren Lehrer, has the subtitle, “in the wake of the virus,” marking our distance from lockdown. Return and reawakening register in subtle observations of “opening” so that the earlier closing is implied rather than addressed. We are back in the world, sort-of, through milestones and marked moments in which the concept of “open” carries a variety of meanings.
I have been a fan of Lehrer’s work for decades and was recently introduced to Karasick’s writings through her Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas, one of the few books by someone else I ever wished I had written. This new collaboration by Lehrer and Karasick provides an opportunity to think about the way the design of language transforms and informs a work.
The book is divided into two parts each with its own poem. The first, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, contains seven “openings.” The second poem Touching in the Wake of the Virus, subtitled “A Panddendum” focuses on navigating touch.
Lehrer’s visualization plays with motifs that proliferate in Karasick’s text. Polyglot resonances reflect the global reach of the virus… patterns of sonic effects… air bubbles and exclamations effervesce… erotic play and sexual associations culminate in the corona virus floating through and across the space. Vectors of force and torque instantiate a text that also has edges and conflicts, interruptions and disruptions, and careens towards its final statement.
This collaboration creates a new work, distinctly shaped, strikingly formed, a work worth looking at and reading as—not through—its graphical language. Nothing in the final project feels like a wrong note or mistake. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a vivid book, vibrant and attractive, and handled with suppleness.”
Johanna Drucker, JD: ABCs Newsletter, Substack
“An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page.
In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust deconstruction upon the world, unraveling beliefs and allowing people to see the world with new eyes—whether they want to or not. Karasick’s poems and Lehrer’s images of textual choreography deal with what emerging from a long, isolating quarantine feels like ‘in the today of wild touching; / the today of withholding, the today of / passionate rations.’ …Karasick often uses alliteration and sonic association, using language to represent this slow re-entry—the kinetic chaos of relearning one another. Lehrer makes a performance out of form… forcing the eye to sweep across unpredictable, textured pages when Karasick’s speakers lament their physical alienation… This collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“A striking publication that gives voice (and form) to the challenges, triumphs, interactions and realizations of our post-pandemic world. In this engaging hardback, writer, designer and book artist Warren Lehrer has visually staged powerful lines by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick. Raw emotions and meaning jump off the page in stirring alliterations, capturing observations made throughout the years of lockdowns… The chaos, pain, hope and connections (or absence of) experienced during the pandemic are inescapable in these playful visualisations…. The publication comes to a close with a QR code that links to another collaboration—this time with Grammy-award winning composer and musician Frank London—of powerful recordings, delivered with such fervour by Karasick… Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings demonstrates the crafting of a sensory experience and will interest anyone with an appetite for linguistic and typographic experimentation… ”
Amy Henry Eye Magazine
“A total work of art, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings combines poetry, typographic design, and music as a single unit… The soundtrack of Karasick’s reading of the poems to sound design by composer/performer Frank London allows one to read/view Lehrer’s typography along with the aural presentation. The two poems—“Openings” and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus”—express a re-awakening of body and mind after two years of seclusion. The poems demand a performance and exuberance that matches their look, their puns, alliterations, allusions, and sheer sonority of enunciation… It is a reward for those who have survived and endured—so open the book, touch its surfaces, and enjoy.”
Tom Bowden Book Beat, I Arrogantly Recommend column
“[Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings] is like nothing I’ve seen in recent memory… I wonder why most books don’t look like your book? Why is it such a dark horse? Because what you’re doing is not ‘experimental.’ It’s 21st-century realism… It’s not just that this is a pandemic book. People don’t seem to realize the world in front of them. Because they go about their whole day, they’re texting with their friends, they’re looking at YouTube videos, and then, when they sit down to write, they might as well be sitting there with a quill and a candle. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a 21st-century book. It’s how information flows… A joyful meditation connection to our post-everything world… Laid out in a perfect expression of what the language is doing… gritty… beautiful!”
Bill Lessard Heavy Feather Review
(interview with Karasick & Lehrer)
“Ouvert, Oeuvre: Openings is a work of art, with Adeena Karasick’s poetry beautifully choreographed by Warren Lehrer. It also features a QR code in the back matter granting access to Karasick’s oral performance of the poetry via a SoundCloud link adorned with music by Frank London. The resulting multimedia engagement is a thoroughly provocative social commentary, offering new vectors of experience guiding the reader’s gaze across the orchestrated page, beyond conventional silent reading… granting us a glimpse of our unmediated selves.”
Steven Hicks Fence
“The Covid virus and ensuing chaos is now a touchstone of early 21st-century artistic expression, especially poetry, not the least of which is the dramatic Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings. The poems by Adeena Karasick, a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist, media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics, have been interpreted and typographically visualized by Warren Lehrer, a pioneer of the typographic narrative and poetry movement. Delicately designed and smartly produced—in a smyth-sewn, three-color foil-stamped three-piece hardcover binding—Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and type… and will appeal to anyone trying to find humanity in the wake of pandemics.”
Steven Heller Print Magazine
“Innovative Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings Book Explores Post-Pandemic World… This is the first collaborative book between poet, performer and cultural theorist Karasick and designer/author/vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer who has a track record of producing work which melds books, typography, animation, and performance… The book comes with a soundtrack recording of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.”
Fine Books and Collections
“An artistic collaboration that evokes—through poetry and design—the reopening of the world after Covid-19 shut it down… What captures the imagination in both these poems is the gray areas between opening, but not fully, and touching, but not all the way, and not with confidence… In this book, which comes with an audio soundtrack, the oral and the visual and the printed word all come together.”
NY Public Radio
“A true masterpiece of linguistic play and exploration! Karasick and Lehrer have created an exceptional work that deserves recognition for its innovative approach to language, masterful use of visual and literary techniques, and its contribution to the ongoing conversation about language, media, and culture.”
Paolo Granata, Professor, Book and Media Studies, University of Toronto
“Recommended for all poetry lovers… In Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, words capture the complexity and richness of touch, with its ability to connect us to others, to leave a lasting impression, and bring pleasure and joy… from a reader’s mind and a wardrobe, to the sea and a microphone… Transformative and deeply rewarding.”
Ruchi Agarwal Pegasus Literary
“A book that asks the reader to engage in such original and challenging ways. It’s an absolutely gorgeous reading experience on the page. Then through a QR code in back, you get to experience and read along with the recording of Adeena’s beautiful, trance-like performance. Spectacular!”
Karen Karbiener Director, Walt Whitman Initiative
“Like slowed-down Joyce, with less inscrutable puns but equally high-powered formulas and searing insights, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings deserves our utmost attention. A deftly wrought and groundbreakingly crucial volume.”
Derrick de Kerckhove, author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence
Punning with conceptual condensations until pleasures become fireworks, joyously singing the language dynamic, displaying heartfelt learning, sexy switch-ups and flights of insight, this work is a gasp-worthy balance of poetic eros, theoretical intelligence, and luminous suspicion. An all-round original book, here the sacred, the playful, the Kabbalah and the female are flying high in polymorphous boldness. A hell of a book. Karasick blasts on all her cylinders!
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet-critic
_________
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D., is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin). Other publications include Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink, 2023); Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas (The Institute of General Semantics Press, 2022) Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018); SALOMÉ: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), and CD, (NuJu Records, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute; is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology; Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication; 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient; winner of the Voce Donna Italia Award for her contributions to feminist thinking; winner of 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship (MEA), and 2023 Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Adeena Karasick website
Frank London is a Grammy-award winning composer, trumpeter and innovative force in Jazz, Klezmer, New Music, and World Music. A founding member of The Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, he has performed with John Zorn, LL Cool J, Mel Torme, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, Itzhak Perlman, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, Maurice El Medioni and Gal Costa, and is featured on over 500 records. His projects include the folk-opera A Night in the Old Marketplace; 1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America with Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer; SALOMÉ: Woman of Valor with Adeena Karasick. He was music director for David Byrne and Robert Wilson’s The Knee Plays. His many film scores include John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet and Men With Guns, Yvonne Rainer’s Murder and Murder, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s The Conspiracy.
FALL TOUR SCHEDULE
Wed. Sept. 6, 4:30pm Karasick performs Ærotomania & Openings In Times Square 43rd & Broadway Stage (by big Flag), NYC
Mon. Sept. 11, 7pm Karasick at Bar 718, 718 5th Ave, Boog City Fest, Park Slope, NY
Thurs. Sept. 21, 1:30-2:30pm Walt Whitman Initiative American Love Speaker Series Containing Multitudes: The Visual Literature of Warren Lehrer, with Adeena Karasick, WWI YouTube Channel
Sun. Oct. 1, 6pm (with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright and Heller Levinson) P & T Bookstore Presented by Word Shed NYC, 180 Orchard St. NYC
Fri. Oct. 6, 7pm **** OUVERT OEUVRE: OPENINGS **** BOOK LAUNCH_PARTY **** Karasick/Lehrer, Center for Book Arts Moderated by CBA Director Corina Reynolds, 28 West 27th St. NYC. Admission is free but seating is limited so please register in advance at the link above.
Thurs. Oct. 12 Lehrer presents at AIGA National Conference View from Here, LENS Symposium, Reconsideration of Vis Lit History, Sheraton Time Square, NYC
Fri. Oct. 13 Karasick presents Openings & Ærotomania at New York State Communication Association Annual Conference: Communication in a Digital World, Villa Roma, Catskills, NY.
Thurs. Oct 19, 6pm Maine Writers & Publishers Association Word Literary Festival, Lehrer & Karasick, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine. Also Featured in Word. Art. Exhibition.
Sat. Oct. 28, 2pm Negotiating Deepfakes… as read through Checking In 2, The 71st Annual Institute for General Semantics Symposium, Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park South, NYC
Thurs. Nov. 9, 7pm Karasick with Lehrer, Tolstoy’s Lounge @ The Russian Samovar 256 W. 52nd St, NYC
Sun. Dec. 3, 6pm, Karasick with Lehrer, Torn Page Salon, 435 W. 22nd Ave, NYC
2024 touring schedule includes reading/performances in Australia, Italy, France, Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
Stay tuned for more info…
Past pre-launch reading/performances of Ouvert Oeuvre include: Aug 3, Massy Arts, Vancouver, BC; July 22, Le Petit Versaille Garden, NYC; June 25, Annual Media Ecology Association Convention, Fordham U; June 3, Secret Handshake Gallery, Toronto; May 6 & May 20, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY.