Yesssssss!
Gabrielle Civil is featured on NYLON magazine. She speaks with Ilana Masad about her work, her book Experiments in Joy, art, and performance.
From “Gabrielle Civil’s Art Is an Experiment in Joy”:
What happens for me when I’m making a performance, is that I create the box, the frame, the context. I create a space in which I can do whatever I want to do and be whoever I want to be, for however long that performance is, whether it’s three minutes or an hour or two.
“Choi recasts the familial legacy of war and displacement, but also of joy and triumph, into a private spiritual kingdom, where “even after the city is destroyed” he writes, “I will touch you on the surface of everything.” This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden. This book is golden.”
—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
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“This book is so meticulous and so absorbing, I am in awe. It is declamation, reflection, proposal, documentation, blueprint. Gabrielle Civil is revealed as an artist perfectly poised to speak to how race, gender and sexuality enact embodied performativity. She writes and performs herself into history in ferociously intelligent and relentlessly personal ways. How the specificity of identity mixes with desire to confound, comfort or disrupt public space. As with so many things that I love, I want everyone to read this book.”
—Miguel Gutierrez, performance maker
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The essays and poems contained within this anthology are not only compelling but also harrowing stories of sexual assault. None of these pieces were easy to write–and were born out of traumatizing and terrible experiences. CCM believes in providing a safe space within the literary community where we can not only talk about painful experiences and issues but also necessary considering the current political climate.
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“‘Fuck understanding,’ Christopher Higgs writes in his yearlong project, “live in confusion.” For Higgs, the self is not so much a mystery as an opinionated porosity. Though purposely artless, Higgs offers some stunning passages, such as an extended rant about his probable deaths, which makes the ground of reality tremble. Simultaneously superficial and profound—like all worthwhile books—As I Stand Living is a highly-relatable manifesto against relatability.”
—Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World and The TV Sutras
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“Living in San Francisco, I’ve known of Lorenz’s work for years, and now the secret is out. Here’s an artist whose palette holds the colors beauty and brutality, squalor and tenderness. Lucky for us, he mixes them into literary combinations we’ve never known before. One Way Down (Or Another) might be the best debut I’ve ever read!”
–Joshua Mohr, author of Sirens
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“Rathore’s writing is exhilarating; funny, daring, and deeply, deeply moving. This collection is one of the best I’ve read all year; it’s a book of rare ambition and scale.”
–Keiran Goddard, author of For The Chorus
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