Four our last poetry event of 2024 we are elated to be closing out the season with Amy De’Ath’s excoriating whirlwind of Marxist avant-garde poetics Not A Force Of Nature. “If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet’s surface, if “words do cleave the producer from the land,” then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De’Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy’s poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what’s different? “Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi,” or “everything…that you want from women and gays.” Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. “Behold me I’m you now,” Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed.” — Kay Gabriel Amy De’Ath teaches contemporary literature, culture, and theory at King’s College London. Her critical book, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction, proposes a new way of reading poetry based on Marx’s critique of value. She is the author of several short poetry books, including Lower Parallel (Barque Press, London), and ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition (Capricious, NY), and with Fred Wah, editor of a poetics anthology, Towards. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press). Not a Force of Nature is her first full-length collection.  Reading alongside Amy will be: Amy Ching-Yan Lam: an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong. Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru): an artist living and working in Oslo. Vettukattil studied at Central St. Martins in London and the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. They are part of the Institute for Scene Experiments. Recent exhibitions include Hothouse Flowers, Podium, Oslo (2024), Postproduction, Studiengalerie 1.357 Goethe University, Frankfurt (2023), Contaminators, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023) and Claustrophobia Alpina III, Ford, Geneva (2023). Current exhibitions include Defund The Police at Arcadia Missa, London (Until 17 December 2024) and Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo (Until 26 January 2025). Fintan Calpin: a poet from London. He is finishing his doctorate at King’s College London on contemporary poetry, rhetoric and the critique of value. He edits the magazine Still Point and has a pamphlet, Terminal City, forthcoming with Veer2. Naomi Weber: the author of four poetry chapbooks, including The Marriage of Daughters to the World and Each Other (Veer, 2019) and AND ALL OF A SUDDEN WE MISS EVERYONE (Sad/Face Press, 2018). She lives in London. The event will be compered by the wonderful Samuel Solomon, who teaches at the University of Sussex where he is co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. His collection Special Subcommittee was published by Commune Editions in 2018, and he has also published a critical book, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2019). This one’s going to be a scorcher. Readings will start around 7:15-7:30 and wrap up by 9:30. Milling about and chatting encouraged. THIS IS A FREE EVENT. ADVANCED BOOKING RECOMMENDED. YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO BYOB .