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Red Emma’s

Ailish Hopper presents Dark~Sky Society

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Wednesday, May 6th 2015

7:30 pm

Red Emma's

Racism and white supremacy affect all dimensions of American public life, from institutional practices and spaces, to everyday, code-switching language. So, it’s not surprising that it also lives on in American poetry.  But how can a poet write honestly about power and difference---without reinforcing those differences? How can a poet use vulnerability, and honesty about the body, to find new race-realities? The poems in Ailish Hopper’s new book, Dark~Sky Society, explore the ways language can be complicit with, or resistant to, racism and white supremacy, asking if it’s possible to be both raced and free, where the disguises of power are blown, and another future is contemplated. Hopper is also the author of a recent Boston Review article (“Can a Poem Listen?”) about racism in the white literary world. Join her for a poetry reading, and Q&A/ dialogue after.  

“[T]he taut economy of Ailish Hopper’s syntax befits a chronicler bent on [the] collapse of the personal and sociopolitical…— lyrical arabesques constructed in terse verbal defiance….Consider her verse coiled and sprung; and, to paraphrase an exalted homegrown colloquialism, ‘busted loose’.” ---Greg Tate

“The public and personal intertwine because they have no space in which to exist separately. …from an admonition, to a hope, to a fact no one is free of.” ---Jacob Strautmann

“Hopper’s lines halt, knot, interdigitate, and stutter, but they never flinch. She leaves that to the reader. What she doesn’t offer us are easy epiphanies, a bid for being a good caucasian, or post-race snake oil. This is difficult work for a time when “any touch/will bruise”. Dark~Sky Society insists we reach and be reached anyway.“ —Douglas Kearney

“These poems are human. They move like legs on a street, like a mind at work that calls you to ruminate with it. Because we can’t understand everything, we have to be comfortable in that space of being unsure…Hopper calls it “Art out of Ignorance” and I agree, but wonder if it is not also “Art out of a Refusal to Misunderstand.”…“Dark Sky Society” does not see its own bravery. It does not draw attention to its confrontation of everything “place” can mean. And it does not apologize. The poems implicate themselves, and in turn implicate anyone who has ever dared to wonder, “How and why does our world work in this way?” ---Jen Fitzgerald

Bio:

Ailish Hopper is the author of Dark~Sky Society and the chapbook Bird in the Head. In addition to page-poetry, she performs with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis in the band, Heroes are Gang Leaders, a tribute to Amiri Baraka. She teaches in the Peace Studies program at Goucher College.

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