Bloodtide Book Launch!
Providence Public Library’s Janaya Kizzie will host this celebration of BLOODTIDE: A NEW HOLIDAY IN HOMAGE TO HORSESHOE CRABS.
Join Marco McWilliams and Bloodtide author Eli Nixon for an evening of readings, performance and crabaoke!
This event is free and open to the public but be sure to register!
Where: Zoom
When: Wednesday, December 15, 7:30 – 9:00 p.m. Eastern
Cardboard workshop how-to, karaoke songbook, nature drag theorization, 450-million-year-long love letter, field guide to a different future—Bloodtide proposes exactly what we need in a form we never imagined. Bloodtide is a new holiday to gather us around an homage dedicated to 450 million years of horseshoe crab fortitude.
“There is a crinkly poetry to BLOODTIDE, repurposed poetry, the poetry of wild rebirth snatched from the recycling bin. Words I thought I knew cast shadows that turn them into other beings entirely. Humble is an important word in this book, and so is impossible, and so is cardboard. I don’t think you can make a book like this unless you have been making art and doing liberation work for, oh, I don’t know, twenty years. BLOODTIDE is a box full of wild objects, and the wild space between them. It’s might-y — might like “could be” not like brute force. It expands, has expanded me. I gasped a few times and my nose twitches with the smell — the “rutty musk of the freer beasts within us.” It is radical, it is wise, it is alive.” – Agnes Borinsky, author of Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 and Sasha Masha
It’s a holiday drawn from the author’s own need for new cultural practices and extended as an offering for anybody to use with hopes of contributing to collective liberation. Bloodtide attempts queer futurity, without mythologies of settler innocence and with sustained recognition that time extends through our ancestors: recent ones and ancient. Bloodtide promotes horizontalist structure building practices through pageantry, crabaoke, naturedrag, cardboard sculpting, feasting and other hands-on, locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. Bloodtide posits that homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual healing/transformation.