Healing Futures: Weaving Thresholds
“I try to return my neighbor his shadow/only it saturates the soil” – Sahar Muradi
“Temple of textures/harbinger of the recollected/Every shadow its book” – Eléna Rivera
Sahar Muradi and Eléna Rivera enter the shadows of language to shape spaces for refuge. How do we translate war, loss, the rituals of there to here without erasures? Muradi and Rivera invite us to play, reckon, chew on concepts as if they were ice cream, delve the epics of our present even as they update the terms and subjects. We find here: confluences of pasts & presents, interrogations & chants, braidings of thresholds we may enter but not necessarily contain, home & shadows of home – and when we are, a grace of shadows as home.
Healing Futures, curated by Purvi Shah, is a series of three readings featuring six writers in collaboration with with six artists. Each event presents the poetry of two writers around the theme of Healing Futures and unveils two new limited edition broadsides. The poet/artist collaboration explores the relationship of text, image, and design, incorporating the artists’ visual conveyance of writers’ poetry and prose in broadside form. This event is hosted by Purvi Shah with readings by Sahar Muradi and Eléna Rivera.
Sahar’s broadside Washee/was she was designed & printed by Rhonda Khalifeh, and Eléna’s broadside September was designed & printed by Oswaldo García.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council
A note from the curator of the series:
“In January 2020, as I was supporting the development of a restorative justice collaborative to address intimate violence, Sevonna Brown from Black Women’s Blueprint observed that we have to heal the past to heal the future. In Healing Futures, I draw together poets who heed Brown’s call to attend to the wounds of the past for the sake of present & future liberations.
In my curation of Healing Futures, I gather writers who tend lineages while facing harms, while holding close the life-blood of harm, who marvel even when there are not answers – for living is marvelous. The poet pairings are prisms, light shared, light refracted, light pooled. The poet pairings are histories & futures unfolding. The poet pairings are braids that at times come together, at times come apart, come always as they are. Collectively, they are wonders of attention, a praxis of futures, a healing. Collectively, they are an invitation to be an accomplice in awe and liberation.”
-Purvi Shah
