[Reading group] rile* reads

We are delighted to welcome you to rile* reads, a new reading group series hosted by rile* books. We'll gather every Wednesday of July around a different book, with an intention to read it in full, together; to sit with ends, meanings of ends and beginnings of summer. It's July after all and the sun cycles our longing: rest, read, repeat. Bring your hearts. Come for stray syntax and moving texts; you/have/our/word.

Schedule

01/07 - reading Money City Sick as Fuck by Anne Boyer

08/07 - reading Tigris Vol. 1, ed. by Sargon Boulus

15/07 - reading Anatomy of a Refusal by Sahar Khraibani

22/07 - reading Comeback Death by Jennifer Soong

Practical info

The reading group takes place from 18h to 20h at our space at Rue des Commerçants 62. Copies of the texts will be available, no reading in advance necessary. A light dinner will be served at a suggested donation of 5 euros. Please send an email to rsvp to info@rile.space.

Money City Sick as Fuck

Selected from a sequence of 100 poems written on a long day in the summer of 2013, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck imagines writing a poem "in a confederacy of exception [...] called 'wages for tenderness and nothing else'". Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at "Texaco in ruins" or the amusement park, in a bar called Lethe, at the saddest prom in history, taking "every odd route", these poems passionately survey and survive the streets and jails of the modern-day polis, "sunbathing in Atlantis", oracles IRL.

Tigris Vol. 1

In 1971, the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris. The magazine—a whisper on the literary landscape that appeared three years after Boulus’s arrival in the US—brings together work by Boulus and several of his literary friends, in translation by Boulus and Etel Adnan. [...] Tigris was not an end in itself, but rather a temporary solution to the lifelong problem of how to devote oneself to poetry across different countries, eras, and styles: how to live poetry. Yet, in so doing, the small anthology includes significant work: Etel Adnan’s “Jebu,” translated by Adnan, and poetry by Boulus, Fouad Rifkah, Yusuf al-Khal, Mouayad al-Rawi, and Riadh Fakhouri, all in Boulus’s translations, as well as a work by Ankido, a “street-activist poet-café worker of importance to the Palestinian Liberation Movement.”

Anatomy of a Refusal

Written after the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, when 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in the commercial and residential  port of Beirut after years of warning and mismanagement, Anatomy of a Refusal drifts between lineated and prose poetry, creating a transitional space of mourning. Comprised of three sections, “Mutually Assured Destruction” confronts displacement; “Blast” erases and rescribes bureaucratic documents written about the explosion, and “Deterrence” “return[s] to the place of injury.” 

Intertextually poetic, Sahar Khraibani writes in conversation with other writers and philosophers to question, “who owns my language?” and “What does it mean to be in / place?" And yet, between bureaucracy and philosophy, there are moments of intimacy, friendship coexisting in the shared space of the poem—between speaker and addressee, the body and the living world—where belonging carries the weight of grief.

Comeback Death

Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling.

Credits

Descriptions of the books provided by the publishers. Description of Tigris sourced from Arablit. Cover image by ire, drawing by szymon hernik.