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Dear friends,
I'm excited to announce that my new book Alisoun Sings (Nightboat) will be launching on 19 Nov 2019 in NYC and London!
Several years in the making Alisoun Sings finds its starting-point in Chaucer’s iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Written in a lively mash-up of languages old and new, this wild ride, fast-paced yet meandering monologue in many voices returns from the 14th century and navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages. Third volume in a trilogy of award-winning books combining ancient and new materials into investigative forms. / note from the publisher /
Conversation @ King's College, London. Tuesday 19 Nov, 6:30pm - Free entry
If you are in London, please join me at King's College London where I'll be speaking with the wonderful medievalists Clare Lees and Josh Davies about the book, its influences, its performative poetics, its interdisciplinary and queer methodologies. Might also show a short film.
Drinks and nibbles after the conversation thanks to CLAMS. Open to the public but limited spaces so please book! Tickets are available at the link here.
If you're unable to be with us in person, do join us via Facebook Live to share in the event. We'll be live from 6:15PM GMT on the Sonic Atlas Facebook page here.
x Caroline
Advance Praise for Alisoun Sings
It made me laugh out loud in some sections, nod wisely in others, want to chorus a ‘yes!’ here, and a ‘go- girl’ there. I love its generosity, and its collectivity, its command and range of tone and style, its stylishness, and its many voices. A woman from the fourteenth century and a poet from the twenty-first join forces to tell it how it is. Chaucer better watch out.
—Clare Lees, Director of the Institute of English Studies, London,
Editor of The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Literature
As a reader the work is transportive, I enter a new and unfamiliar space as I read this, it feels almost archaeological in nature. There are worm holes here, carved out through space and language, stories and places, centuries collapse, gaps in time dissipate, the medieval and the modern merge.
—Rachel Lichtenstein, writer and curator,
Rodinsky’s Room, On Brick Lane
Alisoun’s been to hell and back as an art and fashion loving, potty mouthed, unaccommodating desiring feminist queer mother-of-us-all disobedient and irrepressible and ever deep and vulnerable language breaker.
– Rachel Levitsky, publisher, activist, NY-based writer.
Ecofeminist writer and performer Caroline Bergvall follows her earlier brilliant Meddle English by dialoguing with, not quite melding into, Chaucer's vernacular muse, the Wife of Bath. An inspired, tragi-hilarious mixing and meddling of modern and medieval Englishes, a rallying cry for bio- and-linguistic diversity, a ferocious unleashing of sexual and bodily power.
—David Wallace, medievalist, Europeanist, author of Chaucer: A Very Short Introduction
Alisoun Sings, Nightboat Books 2019
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