The Poetry Project

House Party #13

In this week's House Party we join Litmus Press in celebrating the publication of Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D -- a book which, inspired by that great painter of both ecstasy and struggle, Hieronymus Bosch, explores themes of reckoning, conflagration, and transformation. This special issue features a reading and discussion, accompanied by excerpts from the book, with Mónica de la Torre, Forrest Gander, and Fred Moten, joining Retallack and E. Tracy Grinnell to celebrate BOSCH'D through an exploration of etymology and origins, methodologies for thinking and ways for being. As we begin to emerge from a prolonged isolation into a moment of heightened, urgent, and complex collectivity, BOSCH'D reminds us of our fundamental entanglement, in joy and in grief, now and forever. By way of introduction Retallack explains that BOSCH'D is "a kind of secular liturgy, dedicated to the improbable idea of a poethical anthropocene. That aspiration.... means loving the improbable." We are glad to join her in this love of the improbable, challenging as it does the limits of probability, and guiding us beyond.

Elsewhere