Tarot Diary

Join The Poetry Project this Halloween as we follow our otherworldly guide, the late poet and occultist Stephen Jonas whose collection Arcana was recently released from City Lights, into a world both mysterious and musical, where names change, where nothing is quite what it seems in the exchange of light and shadow. Jonas writes, "tonite i want a full moon / like a slice of provolone / where rats nibbled at the edge" and on Halloween night so do we.

With performances by Anahit Gulian, M. Lamar, Iris McCloughan with Doug LeCours, Edgar Oliver, M. Elizabeth Scott, and Rachel Rabbit White, a screening by Alison Nguyen, drinks, and music. Wear a costume and bring your tarot cards, we'll see you there.

Cover: Anahit Gulian

Anahit Gulian, born in Armenia in 1989, is a writer and artist living in the orange shadows of New York City. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dizzy Magazine, and The Recluse; her drawings have appeared in NUTS! Magazine, Never Sit, the internet, and the covers of chapbooks and records. She is one half of Imp Books and sings in the band Nandas.

M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Bergen Assembly’ Bergen Norway, Basilica Soundscape Hudson Ny. Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, National Sawdust New York, The Kitchen New York, MoMa PS1’s Greater New York, Merkin Hall, New York, Issue Project Room New York, The Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco; Human resources, Los Angeles;Wesleyan University; Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others.

Doug LeCours is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer, and writer. His work has been presented in NYC by AUNTS, Center for Performance Research, New York Live Arts, WeisAcres, and the Performance Mix Festival. He has been a resident artist at Chez Bushwick and a Fresh Tracks artist at New York Live Arts. As a performer, he has worked with choreographers and directors including Keely Garfield, Catherine Galasso, Julie Mayo, Pavel Zuštiak, and RoseAnne Spradlin.

Iris McCloughan is a trans* artist, performer, and writer. Their performance work has been presented in NYC (JACK, CATCH series, Ars Nova), Philadelphia (Institute of Contemporary Art, The Barnes Foundation / Philadelphia Contemporary, FringeArts, Vox Populi), Chicago (Links Hall), Los Angeles (PURE O) and elsewhere. Iris was the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Their chapbook No Harbor was the winner of the 2014 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series, administered by L+ S Press. Their poetry has appeared American Poetry Review, juked, Gertrude, and decomP, among others. Since 2014 Iris has collaborated with Eiko Otake as a performer and dramaturg for various projects. Iris has also collaborated with many other artists and ensembles, including Avery Z. Nelson, Julie Mayo, Leslie Rogers, Jaime Maseda, and Mel Krodman.

Alison Nguyen’s work explores the ways in which images are produced, disseminated, and consumed within the current media landscape, exposing the socio-political conditions from which they arise. Creating strategies for dissent, she re-articulates mainstream cinematic language in unsettlingly seductive installation, video, and sculptural works that generate a self-aware gaze within which the viewer becomes both producer and consumer of their own spectacle.

Nguyen received her B.A from Brown University, Providence, RI. Her work has been screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads presented by SF MoMA/SF Cinemateque, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, True/False Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Microscope Gallery, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Leeds International Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Marfa Film Festival, L’Alternativa at CCCB, and Traverse Vidéo, among others. Her work has been exhibited at AC Gallery Beijing, The International Studio & Curatorial Program, Centre Des Arts Actuels Skol, Chashama, BOSI Contemporary, The University of Oklahoma, and Satellite Art Show, Miami. She has participated in group performances at The Whitney Museum of Art: Dreamlands Expanded, Parrish Museum, and Mana Contemporary (in collaboration with Optipus). Nguyen has received residencies and fellowships from the International Studio & Curatorial Program, The Institute of Electronic Arts, BRIC, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, Signal Culture, and Vermont Studio Center. She has been awarded grants from NYSCA and The New York Community Trust. In 2018 Alison Nguyen was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

M. Elizabeth Scott is a poet and esotericist based in New York. She is the co-founder of arts collective Cixous72 and its derivative imprint, 72 Press.

Rachel Rabbit White is a poet and essayist who lives in Brooklyn. Her chapbook Poetry is so Lesbian was just released during the New York Art Book Fair and her first full length collection, Porn Carnival will be released by Wonder this Fall. In this work, hedonism and materialist critique join in an abject orgy of labor confessionals, group texts, and criminality, they are poems turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d’être. She is a Sagittarius sun, moon in Cancer and a Scorpio rising.