Spoken Word Saturday is a showcase of the amazing Spoken Word Poetry talent that can be found from coast to coast. Today, Spoken Word Saturday celebrates LCP Spoken Word Award-winner Adeena Karasick

Eicha I: The Book of Lumenations by Adeena Karasick

Attuned to sound poetry’s domain, Adeena Karasick’s homophonic translation Eicha: The Book of Lumenations unfolds as a dynamic interplay of acoustic and material expressions. Immersed in the intricacies of language’s auditory, textural, and tonal dimensions, Karasick engages the original text, the Book of Lamentations, and brings it into dialogue with the multifaceted layers of our present. A simultaneous act of lamentation and ecstatic intertextual exploration, Karasick’s performance traverses sonic texture and electroacoustic manipulation to resound with a symphony of hope and sorrow.

Eric Schmaltz, LCP Spoken Word Award juror

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press:  2022), shortlisted for Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA, 2023) and winner of the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form. (MEA), Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, (NuJu Records, 2020), and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking, and has just been appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.  Hot off the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, Ouvert: Oeuvre: Openings, (Lavender Ink Press, 2023), and Eicha: The Book of Lumenations film, NuJu Films, NY, 2023.

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