This new week starts off with a brand new recording from our own Kelly Writers House: the September 9, 2021 launch event for Rachel Zolf's new book, No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics. Here's our preview blurb for the event from the KWH calendar:
In No One's Witness, Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—"No one / bears witness for the / witness"—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing.Judith Butler says No One's Witness "shows in brilliant and moving ways how language must change to come close to registering the living aftermath of destruction," and John Keene has described the book as "a critical-theoretical intervention and a lyric prose artifact that will appeal not only to theorists and critics, but also to poets, professors, and students."
For this special event, Airea D. Matthews served as host and interlocutor for the conversation that followed the reading. UPenn undergrad Sofia Sears also makes a guest appearance reading their poetry. Click here to start listening to this event on PennSound's Rachel Zolf author page, where you'll also find a wide array of readings, talks, and performances spanning the last fifteen years.
