Bainbridge Island Notebook & Female Body Retold poetry reading and book launch

with Uche Nduka and Giorgia Pavlidou

We are pleased to welcome Uche Nduka, as he returns to Brooklyn with an explosive new collections of poems, and Giorgia Pavlidou for her new collection Female Body Retold

“In Bainbridge Island Notebook, the measure of pleasure is found in the social fact of song. Sparkling with erotic charges and moral conundrums, Uche Nduka's detonates novelty in the name of love. His short lines create the rhythmic force of news that William Carlos Williams celebrated. This is poetry new, brave, and boisterous.”
—Charles Bernstein

Sheltering with his wife and child on Washington State's Bainbridge Island during a global pandemic, the poet as political surrealist considers themes of isolation and connection in the most personal terms using his unique brand of explosive abstraction to carve out a space to explore the meaning of home, family, and diaspora.

Uche Nduka is an itinerant poet-professor and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 13 volumes of poems of which the latest are Fretwire (Griots Lounge, 2022) and Scissorwork (Roof Books 2022). Nduka's work has been translated into Finnish, German, Romanian, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, Dutch. His essays on music, poetry, mortality, travel, have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School-Eugene Lang and CUNY-Queens College.

Louis Aragon, one of the original Surrealists, wrote: “Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.” Giorgia Pavlidou’s poetry is eruptive in just this way. She uses contradiction, including a savage yet ultimately humane perversity, as a catapult to smash open accepted dichotomies and examine their contents with a critical and sometimes derisive eye. To this work she brings a wide multilingual erudition, including Greek and Sanskrit language and mythology. Formally straightforward, her writing is imaginatively and intellectually intricate and playful, with a queer/feminist impetus. She has her fellow travelers, like Will Alexander, and her foremothers, like Joyce Mansour. But as a poet she is uniquely herself, unlocking a new door to the marvelous.

—

Adam Cornford

Giorgia Pavlidou is a Greek-born American writer who has lived in California, the Benelux and India. She received her MA in Urdu Literature from Lucknow University, India, and her MFA from the Manchester School of Writing, UK.

Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Philosophical Egg, Live Mag!, Al-Khemia Journal, Entropy and Moon & Sun Magazine. Giorgia originally trained in psychoanalytic and systemic psychotherapy.