March 15th: Wayne Koestenbaum in Conversation with Mónica de la Torre
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Wayne Koestenbaum will discuss his new book Ultramarine with Mónica de la Torre.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, March 15th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to Evan@192Books.com.
Wayne Koestenbaum —Ultramarine (Published by Nightboat Books, 2022)
Ultramarine distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine, we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface. Through interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.
Photo: Jan Rattia
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, performer. He has published 22 books, including The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. In 2020, he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive in 2019. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Photo: Carolina Passerini
Mónica de la Torre is poet and translator. Her most recent book of poems and translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat). Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse)—a riff on a riff on Kafka's Amerika—and Public Domain (Roof Books). With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information). The recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, she teaches at Brooklyn College.