Parallax: Poetic Visions, Reader as Voyeur

What does a future poetics look and feel like? The reading series ‘Parallax: Poetic Visions,’ presented by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in association with Zoe Brezsny, addresses this question by featuring poets who take risks through a wide variety of aesthetic approaches and performance styles. Their work bends genres at the crossroads of poetry, sound, and technology, operating as a tool of transformation. For this event, poets Cristine Brache and Aurelia Guo explore how economic systems impact the female body and psyche. With blunt, fearless precision, Brache and Guo turn us into voyeurs as they experiment with their identities and address the power dynamics that frame them. ‘I am a mirage,’ Brache discloses, ‘a beautiful piece of property.’ But her work is an insurrection, an escape. Guo uses the political and aesthetic possibilities of the Internet as a portal for new language. She mimics a restless browser, churning up revelations. ‘Soft art for soft people,’ she writes, and ‘Dissembling was my full-time job.’ In turn authoritative and vulnerable, unruly and calm, phantasmal and genuine, Brache and Guo conjure poems that resonate with paradox. Their texts appear as fragmentary instant messages, slogans, a weather log, a video diary – often unraveling as they go. Image: Sarah Pickering, 'Makeshift Cooking,' 2007