Waking Occupations

The second collection from the acclaimed author of Admission Requirements.

Waking Occupations confronts the obligations we owe to ourselves and to others to live in a creative, generative, and revolutionary way. It weighs the ties we have to family, to artists of the past and present, and to the next generation, to illuminate the cascade of global implications to our current times.

The book is a four-part mediation on what it means to live on occupied land and colonial time, with a subject that has moved beyond arriving and departing and is waking each day to meet her commitments and to heal from complicities, exclusions, difficult truths and the pandemic of forgetting. It follows the figure of the female artist as a time travelling woman, embodied by mother and daughter, through the gallery of memory. The poems enact brief encounters with objects and events that hold us accountable to the political as personal. Finally, a set of anti-elegies mourn what the next generation has already lost, while searching for ancestral medicines and ceremonies that might exorcise us and address our alienation.

Waking Occupations considers what we carry from previous generations and our liabilities to the cyclical nature of the work that uplifts us.