Description
“Carla Harryman’s canny CLOUD CANTATA puts before us a set of inexhaustible, unhurried conversational moments into which diverse quotidian and increasingly pressing topics arrive. Perhaps the moments are sequential—it seems to be morning, though 'morning' here is a relative term. Breakfast seems variously either underway, in preparation, or just finished, and repeatedly one or the other of the conversants mentions something about a dream of the night before. And, too, the phrase 'January to September 2021' appears on the title page. Or perhaps, as I prefer to think, they are vivid alternative versions of a long, multifaceted moment of emergent dialogue, each iteration of which refuses to be hastened to some end. It is morning, after all; incipience is in the air. And for that moment—for the sake of that moment—it is possible to greet the world, even in the throes of its tragedies. CLOUD CANTATA enacts that possibility, summoning onto the scene bravery and play. It’s magnificent.”
—Lyn Hejinian
Poetry. Drama.
Author Bio
Carla Harryman is an American poet, prose writer, playwright and performance writer. She is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of Bard College. In 1979, she co-founded the San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater. Recent performance work includes the CD Open Box, published on the Tzadik label and international performances in Austria, France, Germany, and Montreal. In addition to twenty volumes of single- authored work, Harryman has two edited volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of Journal of Narrative Theory and Lust for Life: The Writings of Kathy Acker, co-edited with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder. Harryman has received grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Fund for Poetry, Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among others. Her works have appeared in translation in Czech, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Serbian. Her most recent works are A VOICE TO PERFORM: ONE OPERA / TWO PLAYS (SplitLevel Texts, 2020), SUE IN BERLIN (PURH, 2018) and L'impromptu de Hannah (joca seria, 2018).
Author City: DETROIT, MI USA