Fantasia Book Launch

Fantasia launches on Thursday 1st Aug at SET Social.

Hosted by Rachael Allen and Nisha Ramayya, and featuring readings and performances by Bhanu Kapil, Donna Marcus Duke, Tara Fatehi, Sam Warner, and Egg Meat. There will be a book stall hosted by Rye Books, snacks and drinks, and the event is free and open to all. Please RSVP via ticket link at end of text.

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Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.

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Donna Marcus Duke is a writer, performer and organiser based across London and Vilnius. She likes community, nightlife, critical spiritualities, hosting, a little bit of danger and this Octavia Butler quote: “Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.” She hates irony, trans people and, most of all, they/them pronouns. You’ll find their writing in fun places like Sticky Fingers Publishing, the Bittersweet Review, Pilot Press and Sissy Anarchy, or in boring places like Frieze, Vogue, AnOther and Dazed. Unfortunately, they are also working on a debut novel (?)’Cult Trans’. When they’re not writing, they’re organising the trans* reading evening TISSUE, or their queer club night Haute Mess at Dalston Superstore, where she enjoys getting naked in front of scores of adoring fans xoxo. 

Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid work, including two new editions of Incubation: a space for monsters, published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press in 2023. Currently, she is based in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. The winner of the TS Eliot prize, a Windham Campbell prize, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, Kapil has written two new books, as yet in manuscript form: The Secret Garden, a novel of the forest, and Promiscuity, an unpublishable work of creative nonfiction. [Photo attached: performance still.] 

Nisha Ramayya works across poetry, criticism, and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She’s the author of States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019) and a new poetry collection Fantasia, which is coming out with Granta in August 2024.  

Tara Fatehi is an artist, performer, writer, researcher. She has sixteen different voices and writes apocalyptic facts, soul-crunching laughs, adult lullabies and theatrical treasures that forefront mistranslation, ambiguity, disjunction, playfulness and unfinishedness. Tara co-creates From the Lips to the Moon music and poetry nights with Pouya Ehsaei. Alongside numerous international performances, exhibitions and published works, her book Mishandled Archive is published by LADA (2020). Tara was the first ever artist in residence at the United Nations Archives in Geneva (2021). www.tarafatehi.com [Photo credit: Jemima Yong] 

Sam Warner is London based Trumpet/Flugelhorn player who has become a mainstream on the UK Jazz scene playing for the likes of Ariwo, Valia Calda, Riot Jazz, Alfa Mist, Tom Misch and Nubiyan Twist. Having decided to pursue a career in music after winning the music for youth competition in the jazz category as a teenager, he went on to study at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He now performs regularly at venues such as Ronnie Scott’s as well as touring extensively around the UK and abroad. On the commercial side he has played or recorded for the likes of Hak Baker, Kojey Radical, Tom Misch, Loyle Carner, Peter Andre, Plan B and Katy B. 
 
Egg Meat is the horrible produce of Tooth Rust aka Laurel Uziell and Georgie McVicar, featuring the vocal folds resonating inside the throat of the poet Danny Hayward. The source of such compressions and rarefactions does not mean that some relation of identity can be drawn between the speaker, the sounds, and their segmentation into words. Maybe the words are spoken, but they do not speak: chopped and screwed and slopped and crude, worms writhing themselves through the loam, at times surfacing as meaningful utterances, at others buried under dense sonic matter. In Philip Sherburne’s review of the self-titled Egg Meat EP, he described these vocal experiments as “unintelligible phrases [that] appear as though from the depths of a fever dream; single words surface, like rotted logs in a flood tide, and slip back beneath the murk.” The cassette also received coverage from The Wire, The Quietus, Ransom Note, ATTN, and DJ Mag. [Photo credit: Sophie Hoyle]