Chimeras, new book and launches

My new book Chimeras is now published on Sublunary Editions, and available here.

On 12 October I will be in conversation with Jennifer Hodgson on Zoom, to talk about Chimeras and its non-identical twin volume Nothing As We Need It, published by Punctum Books / Risking Education. 

You can register here.

On 22 November I will launch both books at Good Press in Glasgow, in conversation with Kate Briggs. The launch is organised by the Art Writing MLitt at Glasgow School of Art. 

I will also present the books at Arnolfini Bristol on 18 October, in the inaugural event of the Writing In Through To Art (WITTA) series curated by Lizzie Lloyd, which will feature readings and presentations by Polly Barton and myself. 

Chimeras is a book concerned with silences, the unspoken undercurrents of untranslated texts. Prompted by the author’s encounters with the lesser-known prose by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72), and with the essays and letters by the Italian writer and translator Cristina Campo (1923-77), Cascella finds her voice in the uneasy space where there seems to be little to say because there is too much that is difficult to articulate; and she asks what happens in writing before translation, what faint signals may be heard, and how to transmit them.

The resulting text presents three approaches to writing in these conditions, all of them arguing for a writing of criticism as kinship, resonance, conversation, entanglement, haunting. In the Deranged Essay the author’s conflicts, euphorias, struggles in reading Campo and Pizarnik become part of the text rather than being excluded; in the Imaginary Conversation, written in the lineage and in the artificial tones of the ancient Dialogues of the Dead, she talks with Campo and Pizarnik drawing on their letters and journals, allowing her words to merge with theirs, in the gaps she found while studying their archives, where evidence is missing and another form of thinking with their works can be imagined and written; finally, the Transcelation is a text written in the form of the making and the tolling of a bell, fusing the old bronze of Campo’s prose into the author’s own, attempting to transmit Campo’s tone, working with the resonance of her words to the point where it is no longer clear who is commenting on whom, transforming, interfering, repeating, as footnotes overspill and become frayed, fictional, confused.