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Anarcadia – Reading with Dominic Hand

Reading

19:00-22:00

Responding to the gap between map and territory, the 24 poems of Dominic Hand’s Anarcadia develop a poetic form inspired by navigation and mapping. They tack and veer across the page as though continuously blown off-course, incapable of following coordinates as they navigate turbulent environments, with no runway to land on in sight. As the book engages with the history of colonial voyages and crossings, it finds contemporary migration crises and ecological violence in their wake. A vision of ‘Arcadia’ is nowhere to be found; instead, Anarcadia moves through an anti-Arcadian world of anarchy and catastrophe, full of freak storms, rising sea levels, deforestation, toxic pollution, resource depletion, species extinction, nuclear waste, mass-industrial agriculture, drone warfare, algorithmic governance and surveillance networks. Amidst ecosystem collapse, Anarcadia explores how simulated environments are (re-)created virtually; how the extinguished springs, orchards and enclosures of the Arcadian imagination live on as literal green screens, as digitally-rendered utopian environments for post-human inhabitation. The book patchworks a mosaic out of fragments produced by systemic collapse, but takes respite in small glimpses of nonhuman beauty and endurance - sap beetles pollinating magnolias, leaves photosynthesizing, a pressed sunflower, patterns on sand dunes, bee colonies, abalone shells, lichens, extremophile bacteria - to go on 'risking bewilderment'.