Join us for a reading of Mandible Wishbone Solvent by Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud. In her fifth and latest poetry collection, Wadud engages with migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint. Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. The poems in this collection engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension.

Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements and a roving we. Wadud will also read from a manuscript-in-progress, Any Want Rings The Circle, which is nominally about the tenuous space between having nothing and everything but nothing to show for the arduous effort of it all.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/mandible-wishbone-solvent

Schedule
16:00 - 17:00  Reading

About Mandible Wishbone Solvent
Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible Wishbone Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art—though not necessarily in that order—with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible Wishbone Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

About Asiya Wadud
Asiya Wadud is a writer whose latest poetry collections are Mandible Wishbone Solvent and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Other recent work can be found in Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. Wadud’s work has been supported by Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Madhouse Helsinki, Beirut Arts Center and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, among others. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and Pacific Northwest College of Art.