Lush with elemental imagery, Aja Couchois Duncan’s Restless Continent communes with a North America that speaks elegiac, celebratory, and melancholic histories human and geological. In this collection, the body of that land and those histories fuses with the body of Duncan’s language, the body of memory, and the physical body. Intertwining English with Ojibwe, this debut collection of poems ominously hails and holds us in its ethereal sound, bearing sharp witness to the ruptures perpetuated by the violences of humanity—bodies and lands colonizing and colonized, naming and othering, stamping life into disappearance—while inviting us to forge with Duncan the mythologies that suffuse her poems with crystalline grace and gratitude.
Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press), Bay Poetics (Faux Press), and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her most recent chapbook, "Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue" was published by CC Marimbo press. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees to certify her as human.
Youmna Chlala is a writer and an artist born in Beirut & currently based in New York. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, video and performance, prose and poetry. She is the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art and the recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her writing appears in Urban Hopes by Steven Holl and in publications such as Guernica, Bespoke, CURA, MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, and XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics. She has exhibited widely including the ICA London, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Camera Austria, CultuurCentrum Bruges and The Drawing Center and Art In General in New York. She is an Associate Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies Department at the Pratt Institute.
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a writer, musician, and scholar interested in sound, resonance, migration, family myths, and finding ways to use them to work through the constraints of the English language. She is the author of two chapbooks: Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014) and As For the Future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016). Recent work can also be found online in The Recluse, Gesture, Brooklyn Rail, Gesture, and Essay Press chapbook Labor Poetic Labor! She is part of the editorial collective of Litmus Press and a PhD student in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.