New Voice Series, featuring Dan Lau, Edward Gunawan, and Carlos Osoria: May 5, 2021

Carlos Osoria reads three poems: "A Cup of Water," "The Tears of Love," and "A Resurrected Heart," the last of these in reference to the story of Orpheus and Euridyce.

Edward Gunawan's presentation opens with his cine-poem, "I Dream of Water," following which he reads two poems: "Chronology of Court" and "Dear Future Ex." 

Dan Lau reads his poem "At Lookout," then speaks about his experience moving from the west coast of the US to the "interior" when he studied in Boise, Idaho. He then reads "An Ecology," "Reader As View," and "Molt." He speaks of attending a staff retreat for Foglifter journal and press, and dreaming "how we want to be...," then reads a poem that came out of drawing tarot cards, "Judgement." Lau closes with a poem regarding a forest goddess whose story gets told by men: "After Athasia in the Marketplace."

Carlos Quinteros III, as emcee, convenes the poets following their readings. Carlos Osoria draws a parallel between her work and Dan Lau's, and how the poems mark and record struggles. Responding to a question from the audience on embodiment in queer poetry, Lau points to the permeability of boundaries and "a courageous direction where you claim it all." Edward Gunawan also notes the policing and regulation of queer bodies, in varying spaces, and how with the pandemic an earlier, younger queer body has surfaced in his writing. Osoria recalls Judith Butler's ideas around gender performativity and how "that high theoretical concept" intersects "at its core" with "how bodies produce a gesture," and the ways in which, via performance and interaction, queer bodies morph and produce themselves, as a kind of poetic process. Quinteros points to the intimacy and fluidity moving through each of the poets' works, and asks about a paradoxical delicacy and force. Osoria comments on the presence of Latin American and Meso-American traditions in their poem "A Cup of Water" and water as a counter to colonial notions of gender rigidity. Gunawan celebrates the "queer line-up" of the poets present, and responds to Quinteros' query on the paradox of delicacy and force coming together, and Lau emphasizes fluidity and a fascination with the formless and "things that can take on form."