Award-winning Amsterdam poet visits Charlottesville for book signing

New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville will host a book reading and signing with award-winning poet CAConrad on Saturday, Sept. 7, from 7 to 8 p.m.

CAConrad will read from their latest poetry collection, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return,” which was released from Wave Books in spring 2024. The in-person event will be free and open to the public. The bookshop recommends arriving early for the best seating.

“Emerging from the queer visionary tradition of Whitman and Ginsberg, the cornerstone of CAConrad’s practice is a series of rituals and instructions which their readers are invited to share in. CAConrad’s aim is to unplug from the corporate machine and reconnect themselves and their readers with the earth and animals and other people,” Philip Terry said.

Following “Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration,” which won the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry, CAConrad’s “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” shifts attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us.

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, the poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship and a Lambda Award. “The Book of Frank” is now available in nine different languages, and they coedited “Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners” (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

New Dominion Bookshop is at 404 E. Main St. in downtown Charlottesville.