Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex by Perrin Roosevelt Ire

Join artist and environmentalist Perrin Roosevelt Ireland and playwright-puppeteer-performer collaborator Eli Nixon for an evening celebrating Ireland's new book, Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex. Expect hula-hooping, suitcase theater, lurid biodiversity, and steamy ecological detail.

The secret sex lives of animals are not so secret anymore, thanks to this punchy illustrated guide to how the other 99.99% get it on. In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us on a wild biodiversity ride through queerness, infidelity, consent, divorce, sex change, and even sexual cannibalism in the animal world. With the help of her cats, Ursula and Pudge, Ireland brings readers along as she learns the latest discoveries imploding traditional notions of sex roles, relationships, and just who is mounting whom. Ireland will present her comics and invite the audience to participate in a bawdy game or two!

Ireland will be joined by Eli Nixon, initiator of BLOODTIDE, a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs and creator of ‘wrack zone’ an intertidal naturedrag and suitcase theater show.  In celebration of Poking the Squid, Nixon will lead a Primordial Time Management Workshop that reckons with 5 billion years of the moon amidst the tide(x2), SPF 50, and an egg salad sandwich in the sun. This ever evolving work-in-progress invites audiences into low-stakes collaboration through drawing prompts and fabric handling. 

Photo credit: Danny Bristoll

Perrin Roosevelt Ireland is an artist and environmentalist. For a decade, she worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ultimately as deputy to the executive director. Her artwork has been published in Discover, Nature, Scientific American, and The Rumpus. She serves on the board of the Roosevelt Institute, was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Aquarium, and is a Banff Graphic Novel Resident. Perrin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats (and muses) Ursula and Pudge.

Eli Nixon is a concoctor of low-tech public spectaculah. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, drawings, suitcase theaters, and primordial interventions.

Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. Eli parents a 16-year-old human and is host to billions of microorganisms… They believe in the transformative power of snacks, tide pools, costumes, friendship and “free time.” They are a Rhode Islander living on Pokanoket, Nipmuc and Narragansett land.