CAConrad

CAConrad & Rosa Campbell on Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Join us in School 6 for a unique poetry event with award-winning, Columbia University poet CAConrad! University of St Andrews School of English fellow Rosa Campbell will join Conrad to discuss the latter's incredible new collection, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, a breath-taking meditation on creative ritual.

Places are complimentary, but please do book ahead by reserving a £0 Standard Place.

The new collection from 'one of America's most legendary living poets' (Ocean Vuong).

when the hammer
approached we thought
is that thing coming this way

Breathing, moving, living on the page, CAConrad's exhilarating work is centred on the (Soma)tic ritual, their celebrated practice which draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an 'extreme present' of unfettered creativity from which poems can emerge.

Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return gathers the results of a single new ritual, focused on fellow animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, and spanning environments from Seattle - a city built in the midst of an abundant nontropical rainforest - to the Mojave Desert. The poet receives gifts from a crow; associates different parts of their body with nine different species encountered in the desert; and joins a woman each morning in feeding rats in the streets of Rome, taking turns looking out for the police.

Written with urgency, hope, anger and joy, the poems that result are an ode to survival in a world that humanity has poisoned, and a testament to a love that knows no by-laws.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Book of Frank (2010), Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (2021) and the selected volume You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis: And Other (Soma)tics (2023). They have received many grants and awards, including most recently the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. They regularly teach at Columbia University in New York City and at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.