&NOW 2018

In queer epistolary poetry, how do the boundaries between private desire and social experience begin to unravel? What does it mean for poets to project the body, its desires, and its grievances across the gaps between the the living and the dead, the human and the non-human? Panelists will read and discuss their own experiments with the epistolary form, which address such issues as the potential for intimacy with strangers, the relationship between sex, power, and political solidarity, the ongoing impact of colonialism on the mestizx body, spellwork and conversing with the dead, the queerness of space travel, and the ways that machines embody emotion and gender.