2904 College Avenue Berkeley
CA 94705
The mid-2000s financial “crisis,” the spread of neoliberalism, and attempts by activists and artists to counter it.
Lyn Hejinian, with Trisha Low and Noah Warren
Celebrating the publication of Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun.
To reserve your seat, please purchase a copy of Positions of the Sun in advance at Mrs. Dalloway’s or by speaking to one of our booksellers.
Positions of the Sun is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes militant cross-genre experiment, combining elements of (largely non-narrative) fiction, with those of local journalism, and of cultural and literary criticism. Its twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” (plus a “Coda”) explore the mid-2000s financial “crisis,” the spread of neoliberalism, and attempts by activists and artists to counter it, through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her approach to the subject, whether it’s the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or characters set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. Positions of the Sun is the second work in Belladonna*’s Germinal Texts Series, which seeks to trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce.
Lyn Hejinian teaches at UC Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which is Positions of the Sun. Her poetic trilogy Tribunal will publish later this year. The recipient of various awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions.
Trisha Low is a poet and performer living in the East Bay. She is the author of The Compleat Purge and the forthcoming Socialist Realism.
Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former Stegner Fellow, his work appears in The Paris Review, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, PEN America, and elsewhere. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley.