The Mud Proposal // Withdrawn 1st draft

Aryanil Mukherjee and Pat Clifford's The MUD Proposal just dropped, featuring work by Neelanjana Banerjee, Madhuja Mukherjee, David Chirot, Tyrone Williams, Clifford, and myself. Proud to be part of this cross- cultural and disciplinary endeavor, of which Clifford and Mukherjee write: "Any metamorphosis initiates at an epithelial level. It begins by rupturing the skin. The boundary. The veneer of separation that stands against epitaxies that in the pretense of feeling and mapping cultures actually prevents transfusion. The purpose of The Mud Proposal is to excite and showcase projects - literary and cross-media - that serve to hasten the transfiguration of one discipline, motive, tradition, medium, procedure and cultural practice into others through free-associations and meditated exchanges."

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“Withdrawn” is a draft of a forthcoming book of poems and other texts. Like my first book, The Hole (2012), it responds to conditions of friendship, community, and the relationship between private and public life during a series of ongoing disasters, both global and local, actual and virtual, ecological and geopolitical. In the process of writing The Hole I realized that what separates a “book” from a collection of texts has something to do with the book’s potential to model and activate certain forms of gathering. So I suspect that Withdrawn, to become a book, will require years still of extension and further thought about what its own gathering could mean. Thanks to the editors of BOMB, The Offending Adam, Peacock Online Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and WITH + STAND where some of these texts have appeared. Thanks also to Aryanil Mukherjee for inviting me to put this draft together in a PDF form for his MUD project.