Parallax: Poetic Visions

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.

Some of the poets in the series are emerging creative forces, while others have had long careers yet continue to reinvent themselves. These pairings seek to juxtapose practices so that each reader might reveal something unexpected in the other’s work.

The seventh and final installment of the Parallax series will feature New York-based writers Kay Gabriel and Shiv Kotecha. Their writing is as erotically rich and imagistic as it is formally masterful and well researched. Both poets have a talent for repurposing cultural references, and they draw from an arresting variety of sources.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist who has published the chapbook Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017). She's also an Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at the Poetry Project, as well as a PhD candidate at Princeton University. With Andrea Abi-Karam she's co-editing an anthology of radical trans poetics, forthcoming in 2020 from Nightboat Books.

Kay's recent work includes sonnets in homage to the Warhol superstar Candy Darling, as well as a ‘Gross-Out Sonnet’ series.

Her approach is equal parts prismatic wit and pithy ferocity. In Gross-Out Sonnet 2, she proclaims, ‘gnight bellies, hello golden syrup! / I’m nobody’s kibble, Tammy / Wynette asks if I’m sure, oh hell. / Phooz phooz for the ripe new year.’

Kay's has said, ‘poetry secretes a kind of pleasure that theory can’t, and I believe that pleasure always carries a political charge.’

Shiv Kotecha is the author of the books The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). He is a contributing editor at frieze magazine. His writing can be found in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books and in other publications. He is also a PhD candidate in NYU’s Department of English.

Shiv’s recent book The Switch transformatively shifts between prose and lyric, and includes an extended apology, in verse, for friendship and desire. It manages the difficult task, in artist Hannah Black’s words, of ‘compress[ing] the mess of everyday sexual feeling, the mess of everyday relating (both on and off the planet of the genital) into these often perfect lines.’

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The event is free and open to the public. Space is limited, RSVP is required.

The entrance to Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookshop is at the ground floor and accessible by wheelchair. The bathroom is all-gender. This event is low light, meaning there is ample lighting but fluorescent overhead lighting is not in use. A variety of seating options are available including: folding plastic chairs and wooden chairs, some with cushions.

Water, tea, coffee, beer, wine, and snacks will be available for purchase.

Parking in the vicinity is free after 6 PM. The closest MTA subway station is 23rd and 8th Ave off the C and E. This station is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are 1/2/3/A/C/E 34th Street-Penn Station and the 14 St A/C/E station with an elevator at northwest corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue.