Reading: Jason Allen-Paisant & Mina Gorji - Roots and Weeds
Join us for our Five Bodies series of free monthly talks and readings exploring creative-critical writing, hybrid methodologies and experimental thinking.
A collaboration between the Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary, this series of talks and readings investigates poetic ecologies in the Anthropocene. Exploring ideas from weeds and water to eco-trauma and deep time, and featuring some of the most important international creative-critical voices working today, the talks and readings aim to open up new conversations about entanglement, coexistence, resilience and sustainability.
This is an edited recording of the event.
For the full programme of Five Bodies events, please click here.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar and writer whose work explores embodied experience in the context of Afro-diasporic politics and worldbuilding. His most recent works reflect on the complex meanings of nature in Black life. His critically acclaimed collection, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 202) has been praised as 'a bold and impressive debut' (The Guardian) and as 'an expansive, fracturing subversive book' (The Irish Times). His work has also appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, New Poetries VIII, The BBC, and other venues, and he has been the recipient of a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Jason holds a Doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and now works as a Lecturer in Poetry and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds. He's currently developing a nonfiction book entitled Primitive Child: On Blackness, Landscape, and Reclaiming Time.
Mina Gorji was born in Iran and lives in Cambridge, where she is Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and a fellow of Pembroke college. Her debut, Art of Escape (Carcanet, 2020) , a Telegraph ‘Book of the Month’, has been described as a collection of "exquisite miniatures that suggest worlds" (Five a Books, Best Poetry Books of 2020), "intricate, considered poems which encourage us to democratise our attention and empathy" (Guardian). She has published poems in Poetry Review, Magma, bath magg and the Forward Book of Poetryamongst others. She has also written a study of John Clare's poetry, and essays on weeds, rudeness, little things and listening; a lyric-critical essay, Listening for Stars, was published in Poetry Review in autumn 2021. Her second poetry collection, Scale, will be published by Carcanet in July 2022.