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Tea Time in the Asian Avant Garden - in conversation w/ Catherine Chen

  • Yu and Me Bookstore 44 Mulberry Street New York, NY, 10013 United States (map)

Even link - https://www.yuandmebooks.com/events/bf6hdkv9fcq9zsafrakjo1o99zdsmo

No registration required!

Join us for an enriching event featuring readings and conversations with Kiran Bath and Catherine Chen. Celebrating their debut collections, we will delve into the world of hybrid and experimental writing among Asian poets in particular, such as Mei Mei Brussenge, Bhanu Kapil, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Julietta Singh, and Etel Adnan.

About Instructions for Banno

In her debut poetry collection, Kiran Bath travels through the timelines and geographies of the women in her family to understand the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride (banno). Threading stories of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, and first generation daughters, she renders themes of subjugation, domestic violence, honor killings, and infanticide alongside unrequited love, sisterhood, motherhood, and devotion in cathartic form. The result is the set of instructions left for BANNO, a diary that ruptures the institution of filial duty and embodies the tradition that survives it—an insistence for declaring our humanity.

About Beautiful Machine Woman Language

BEAUTIFUL MACHINE WOMAN LANGUAGE extrapolates Catherine Chen's experiences as a data transcriptionist for the Amazon Echo in order to examine the emotional--often invisibilized--spaces occupied by the human workers who service AI and other emergent technologies. Beginning with a lyric romance between an unnamed data worker and the AI with whom she falls in love, the collection curates a polyphonic space for how we can imagine our languages of desire for collective dreaming, longing, and archiving.