Emily Van Kley’s (CRF 2018) second book, Arrhythmia will be published in January 2022 by Persea Books. For the occasion, Van Kley collaborated with local artists and musicians to make an aerial + poetry trailer, featuring one of the poems from the book; check it out here. Preorder the book here.
“Written in the years following the sudden death of a cherished friend, Arrhythmia traces the shock doctrine of grief as it electrifies the lives of those left behind. Alliances shift. Loss multiplies. Poems call out from the body, wrestling the twin impossibilities of memory and meaning in language that is by turns starkly simple and twistingly inventive. A tribute to queer friendship, these poems weave chronic grief with the stab of a loved one’s sudden absence—of what happens to the vibrant particulars of a life when it ends.”
Cover art and design by Jessica Helfand (DG 2018), Ventricle from her series “Histologies.”