Ignota Hosts: Fanny Howe, Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines

On Thursday 30 July, Ignota hosted a once-in-a-lifetime online event celebrating the UK publication of A Sand Book by Ariana Reines and in honour of Fanny Howe's Night Philosophy.

CW: sexual violence

Featuring readings by Fanny Howe, Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines, music from Emily Ritz/Lumpland and Yva Las Vegass, and hosted by So Mayer. 

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to natural disasters and state violence, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning.

Night Philosophy, the latest book by Fanny Howe, is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Her stories, meditations and fragments are woven together with passages by Samuel Beckett, Marilyn Buck, Henia and Ilona Karmel, the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and literary ephemera to explore violence, survival and vulnerability.

A Sand Book, Night Philosophy and other books by Fanny Howe, Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines are available to purchase from Burley Fisher, one of London's best independent bookshops, here

Boston Creme tour tees, as modelled by Fanny, are available here.

Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She has mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.

So Mayer is a writer and activist. Recent works include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris), (O) (Arc) and <jacked a kaddish> (Litmus). They work with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes.

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. Their twenty-two books include For Now, an essay/talk about writing from Yale Press (forthcoming, fall 20) evolution (poems)Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for YouI Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they received an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Ariana Reines is author of The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007) and Mercury (2011). Her play Telephone won several Obie awards. Reines was 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California Berkeley; she has taught master classes at Pomona College, the University of California Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in New York, NY.