Book Launch: speculation, n by Shayla Lawz with readings from Joselia Hughes, Carly Inghram and Sabrina Imbler

Thursday Oct 28, 2021
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201

This event will be LIVE at POWERHOUSE Arena! RSVP below!

PLEASE NOTE: Submitting an RSVP for this event DOES NOT guarantee entrance. This is a free-access event — entrance will be on a first-come, first-served basis. COVID protocol will be observed and seating may be limited.

About the Book.

Shayla Lawz’s debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.

Praise for speculation, n.“sometimes i want to ask the earth, / was it beautiful here / without us” writes Shayla Lawz in this virtuoso performance. Innovative, inimitable, endlessly urgent, speculation, n. is far more than just a collection of poems. It is a dazzling verbal and visual performance, a concerto, a book of our days that is as heart-wrenching as it is an accurate portrayal of what it means to live and sing in America today. “i’ve been seeing my body around // in the stairwell, in the house / and even at times in the mirror. in the news” urging us to lift the veil and open our eyes. Some books you read and never forget. This is one of them.” – Ilya Kaminsky

“Is this a kind of fortune or curse?” the speaker asks, “To share a disappearance. Some call this magic.” And this speaker is the poem’s speaker, the TV’s speaker, the radio’s. The speaker is her late aunt, the speaker is the breathless news, the speaker promises she won’t be dying but living; the speaker ponders over the difference. Ponders over the distance between bodies and a body, the family errand and family emergency, 12’s backseat and Sandra Bland’s feet suspended over the cell floor. Here is the hard investigation of being here, then being gone, misplaced, somehow lost, or someone’s ghost. Shayla Lawz speaks: “it’s too late to die, i said / it is far too early,” and her extraordinary book, speculation, n., transmits live from the brilliant Black space between-time. I call this magic. – Douglas Kearney

A self immortalized in phantoms is at once gone and everywhere. This work chases that kind of selfless, misplaced, displaced, replaced, implacable self back into the world. I am trying to forgive/ I am learning about flight, that self admits, and the poems here teach us how to do both at once and survive it. They are as much encounters and visitations as they are recountments of an endless, endlessly threatened reunion between sound, song, memory, and the family that weaves itself through – Harmony Holiday

About The Author.

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. Her writing and hybrid/sound works appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, and The Poetry Project, among others. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

Twitter: @shaylalawz

Instagram: @shaylalawz

About The Readers.

Joselia Hughes is a disabled Afro-Caribbean writer and self-taught artist. Her mediums of practice include poetry, fiction, performance, drawing, painting, photography, video, zine-making and fiber work. She examines languages of finitude; instruments abstractions to surface conditions of disabled Blackness; and interrogates play reclamation as a means to examine societal perceptions and values regarding ability, chronic illness and disability. She’s shared work at bookstores and art centers around New York City including The Strand, Bronx Art Space, Participant Inc, National Sawdust, MoMA, Leslie Lohman Museum and the Poetry Project. Some of her writing has appeared in Apogee Journal, Leste Magazine, Jewish Currents and Ocean State Review. Her full-length poetry manuscript is forthcoming on Inpatient Press.

Carly Inghram is a poet from Atlanta. She received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work is featured in The Indianapolis Review, Prelude, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches Kindergarten in the Bronx.

Sabrina Imbler is a science writer and essayist. They have received fellowships or scholarships from Tin House, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Sabrina loves the ocean and uncharismatic microfauna. Their book, HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES, is forthcoming with Little, Brown in 2022.

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