Reading with Toni Oswald & Friends
Join us on May 2nd @ 7 pm MST for Toni Oswald's reading from Sirens (Gesture Press, 2020). Toni will be joined with friends CA Conrad, Dan Hoy, Selah Saterstrom, HR Hegnauer, Mairead Case, ella longpre, Brent Smith, Sarah Schantz, No Land, and Orlando White in this evening of poetry, community, and magick.
About Sirens:
A girl born a bird becomes a Her. Traversing trauma, ecocide, violence, magic, and the rise of the shattered feminine, Sirens is a wake-up song sung by the daughters of earth.
“Is anything lost ever found?” they ask the collective we. After falling through space, a girl is born part bird who becomes a Her. Her floats and flies—spins the loom of women’s work—baking blue pies, hopping trains, and working as a call girl. Through the tapestries of surrealist landscapes, mystical mantras, and shadowed logos, the story of Her is the story of us, and the emergency of the feminine’s urgent cry to wake up.
Mixing “one part madness, one part genius, blood and sulphur,” Sirens is a feminist manifesto for dark times, warning us that only love will carry us over and beyond life’s most difficult verbs.
Or a short version:
A feminist manifesto — call it an adult children’s book — is made for dark times to warn us that only love can carry us through the shattered feminine, ecocide, violence, and the mystical.
BLURBS:
“This is extraordinary! Reading it out loud with my boyfriend, he said he loves surrealism, but I think this book is a form of magic revealed. Toni Oswald's poems are so unique and brilliant, they deserve a cult following! I will join that cult, and do whatever the poems tell me to do!”
--CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
Sirens is here is her is red white blue and black, nature springing. Sirens of sound poetry on one page slight, the next a garden of cusping thought. Toni Roxanne’s language is her here moon rays smiling, crying, knowing, feeling the day come with its fantastic promise. Sirens is here to love in action, her a gift, a charm, a poet. Thank you Toni.
— Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth & Ecstatic Peace Library)
In Sirens we encounter the multi-bodied, simultaneous emergent, ever-emerging, Her. Her(e) mystical hybridity conjuncts with real life emergencies offering dazzling, pained views of the charnel grounds where we might die a thousand female deaths and finally and also: resurrect. Toni Oswald’s writing teaches us how to endure—and ultimately—celebrate the most difficult verbs.
— Selah Saterstrom author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
If David Lynch died and reincarnated into the body of a little girl with wings who hatched from an egg painted by Leonora Carrington’s ghost, Sirens would be the fairy tale this version of Lynch would then write.
--Sarah Elizabeth Schantz author of Fig
As she falls and as she flies, Her speaks to us in riddled whispers. “You have everything you need,” Her reassures us. But are we being fooled into an old recipe, oscillating between violence and love? Toni Oswald has created a precise poetic world, drawing us into a painful reality all-too-familiar. “Things are much stranger then we have imagined.” Indeed. By way of love, she guides us through her dangerous and intricate landscape. Buckle up, dear reader. Prepare to fly
—- HR Hegnauer author of Sir
SIRENS is Available at:
Gesture Press https://www.gesturepressandjournal.com/
& Amazon
BIO:
Toni Oswald is a writer, musician, performer, filmmaker, and visual artist who currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with her partner Max Davies and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles, Amsterdam and New York. She has performed across the United States and Europe with Anne Waldman, Max Davies, John Frusciante, Thurston Moore, Cecilia Vicuna, Josh Klinghoffer, and many others.
Toni's underground rock journalism has been published in magazines here and abroad, along with literary and visual work in The Oyez Review. Tattered Press, and Bombay Gin. She is currently working on a novel about a fourteen-year-old girl clown set in the 1950's entitled, The Gorgeous Funeral. Her hybrid poetry book Sirens was released in 2020 by Gesture Press.