Event Type
As bell hooks writes it, “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.” In hooks’ black feminist theory, the movement from margin to center, describes an agential political relationship to spheres of power, but how does this movement, from center to margin, also translate into a poetics of extension, rupture, and adjacency? More specifically, in what ways does the margin(al), or what Gerard Genette gestures toward as the paratext’s “zone between text and off-text,” activate forms of mimetic performance from/to the periphery, whether in the simulation of the nonliterary, the nonverbal, and the aphasic, in the extension of the body and the organic world into typographic (and choreographic) space, or in the compression of informational paranoia into hexagrammic concision? In this poetry reading and discussion, Hannah Brooks-Motl (author of Ultraviolet of the Genuine, 2025), Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz (author of whalefall, forthcoming 2026), Sara Wainscott (author of The Star Cabins, forthcoming 2026), and Jose-Luis Moctezuma (author of Black Box Syndrome, 2023) will read work from their latest projects that interrogate the limits of the marginal and the mimetic.
