BIONIC COMMUNALITY
by Brenda Iijima
Bionic Communality demonstrates floral, faunal and mineral consciousness as a cacophonous intensity of collaboratively acting through living histories and emergent meaning. Through textual interconnection, Bionic Communality engages language as both relational and positional. Taking cues from motile and audiovisual sensation in Iijima’s hometown, submerged social facts are laid bare: femicide, ecocide, genocide. Bionic Communality works the intimacies of civic participation. Liberational struggles find power in coalition. Dying is addressed as well as living. Bionic Communality is a vibrant catalyst for personal, social and habitat transformation.
People are saying:
“The alchemy of Brenda Iijima’s writing allows for emergent strategies to suggest reoriented and multivalent ways of speaking and listening—modes animated by a humming plurality of intensities; strategies calibrated to the field beyond the tyranny of Empire. More than a book of ontological meditations, Bionic Communality is a radical-feminist-eco-ethnological text that abides and allies with gaps/breaks/inconsistencies, decay, erasure, patina, accidents, biorhythmic orchestrations, flux energy, and the voices of the dead. It is actually a guidebook for right now.” – Selah Saterstrom
“Bionic Communality records poetic dances of memory, witness, violence, grief, and wonder. In expansive, visceral language, Brenda Iijima interfaces ‘all flora, all fauna, all mineral.’ Bodies emerge here as histories, site, and social apparatus, as energy and protest. You will want to weep and wallow in this ‘expression of changeable forms.’ Indeed, this book vibrates for change and social transformation.” – Gabrielle Civil
“Poems that curate reader focus—whether in columns of CAPITAL LETTERS, basalt obelisks of the uncanny, prophetic or provocative, or whether in aphorism—‘time appears connected to eventuality’ suggest an implied chain of being (pun intended). There are traces of a poet’s life in 21st century America, with its cruel and numbing carceral logic: ‘a cop shoots a round of fire...because repetition is structural.’ Or in another trace of our current continuing climate blindness: ‘we walk on our graves as a daily gesture.’ Or the economy ‘no one uses the term art in these parts/there’s some food and hardship/jobs in a box.’ Brenda Iijima’s marvelous speculative poetics frame the thick plethora of interconnectedness for joint use by readers with the writer. We enter quantum entanglements of sound, syntax, sensing systems of relation, with the body, across the stuff that divides us in an interdependent biosphere.” – Erica Hunt
About the author:
Brenda Iijima is a poet, playwright, choreographer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of genre, mode, receptivity, and field of study. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.