Faculty Member Celina Su’s New Poetry Collection and Reading

Join us for the book launch of EP faculty member Celina Su’s debut poetry collection Landia, which questions spatial practices, architecture and cities as they relate to language, the visual, and literature, featuring Caroline CrumpackerPaolo Javier, EP faculty member Cindi KatzAlissa Quart, and special guest Youmna Chlala, whose first collection The Paper Camera (Litmus Press) is forthcoming. Both Su and Chlala’s new books intersect with their artistic and academic practices in multiple ways along the lines of race, translation, movement, and displacement. In Landia (Belladonna* Series), Celina Su excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives.

Co-sponsored by Belladonna* Series, Litmus Press, The James Gallery, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the Gittell Collective, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Thursday, April 26th, at 6:30 pm in the James Gallery.
For more details, see Event Info.
Landia excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives.
 

Celina Su’s Landia is worldly in the best sense: it is truly about the world. A capacious and much needed response to America’s rising xenophobia… this most sophisticated poetry about our networked society is a set of maps of our shifting and vanishing neighborhoods, tastes and citizenships. “I cannot differentiate the homage from the lament,” Su writes. Landia is both. You will finish it all the wiser.

—Alissa Quart, author of Monetized

 

A consummate wordsmith, Celina Su’s Landia is a searingly fun collection of imagery and meter. It proves that mapping is as subjective as memory and language, and that the Chinatown movie theater is the center of the universe—until it isn’t.

—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

 

In her impressive debut collection, Celina Su extends the possibilities of the poetic, bringing as much careful attention (and firsthand experience) to the concrete details of what she calls “prosaic subjection” as she does to the syntax and moods of poetic language. In this particular political moment, the poems in Landia feel especially urgent… Landia brings together the freedom of the poetic imagination and the realities of state and corporate power, forcing us to re-think the borders of the literary and of the political.

—Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

In the dream-real spaces of “succulent mines,” words travel, dart, bleed, and hide like refugees, like aid workers, like artists, like animals, like exiles, like warriors. The unsettled unsettles everywhere.  And yet is seen, known, made viscerally apparent in Celina Su’s astonishing poems.  Su’s rage is so raw that it pierces your heart, but so beautifully rendered that each fragment is somehow spliced to another’s.

—Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives

 

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