Description
Edited by Michaela Mullin. DISGUST is an epic, fragmented poem born of a week-long performance, a series of escalating constraints that send Emji Saint Spero spiraling into a frenzy and ultimately, a manic break. In this hesitant and hyper-confessional excavation of the quotidian, Saint Spero constructs a manual for maneuvering as a body under duress. Debased, abject, and perfectly problematic, it asks us to dissect the ways in which we are othered and the ways we are complicit in our own objectification. This transcript is an architecture built on lack and inter/dependence. Saint Spero's language stumbles, stutters, interrupts itself, gets it wrong, doesn't know what's being asked of it, is left unfinished, exhausted, and is at its most clairvoyant in its collapse.
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies.
Author Bio
Emji Saint Spero is a writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective engagement. Their practice: a series of approaches, through documentation, personal ephemera, and somatic ritual. They are 1/2 of curbAlert with J Shelley Harrison; together, through movement and collaborative performance, they seek to find embodied modes of connection with unacknowledged spaces of the urban landscape. Saint Spero is the author of almost any shit will do, and they co-founded the Oakland- based small press and queer poetry cult Timeless, Infinte Light with Joel Gregory. With Lauren Levin, they were co- developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma), which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA