Description
Book SynopsisA non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state's boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto.
Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik's experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?
Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.
Trade Review"Daniel Sarah Karasik’s Plenitude is 'trans-socialist' as in (among other things) having 'communism that would abolish debates over when and how to say 'communism’' as its horizon. At turns motivating, thought-provoking, touching and hilarious, this collection compresses volumes of theory and collective experience into shockingly short poems grounded in a world where 'freedom / [is] a spilling over / from one bright, / unbearable / impossibility / into the next' and there’s a 'we' struggling toward it. Karasik is the kind of writer that wants everything; this is the kind of book you read and give to comrades." —Wendy Trevino, author of Cruel Fiction
"In Plenitude, Karasik writes a lyric around gender, writing into a sense and a self, including the political mechanisms of required resistance to exist as a transgender person in the world, as well as the energies required, and the exhaustions that would surely follow." —rob mclennan
"Karasik's commitment to both whimsy and philosophical searching holds the collection together." —Defunkt Magazine
Table of ContentsTable of Contents messianic time
sublimations
publics radiant incipience manifest energy make
work occupation
Kids My Age
In Manila
Despite
To Spite
burrow
A Box Policed
Rothko
Lupron
civility
health
wager
Among Other White Jews Regarding the Prophetic Tradition
MTwtf
Plenitude
trans-socialist
Dysphoria
Smoothed
Closet Exits
Camouflaged
hustle
Tight Pants
TÓngzhÌ
anything you want
the communist enby poem
Spilling Over
alienations
doing what you’re supposed to
A Sense of History
Where Teargas Won’t Reach
Spectacle
Transparency
Degenerate
either/or
warning
innocence isn’t the opposite of violence
Visible to Vanishing
taste
Crow
a simile is more honest than a metaphor thank you no questions at this time
portrait of the autist as a young whatever
containment
June to August
“tough but fair"
Place
Scratch
riding
justice
(rupture) lines
selfie as wish for Chile
on the day after a status-quo federal election in the Canadian state
flower or arm or bloom or hand
Against the Law
movement
