Plenitude

By Daniel Sarah Karasik

A non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state's boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto.

Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik's experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?

Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771667364

Daniel Sarah Karasik

A writer in Toronto, Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is a co-founder and coordinator of Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty, a network that seeks to connect artists with grassroots social movements for radical change. Their recent writing on prison abolition, trans liberation, antisemitism, and socialist aesthetics appears in Briarpatch Magazine. Their Dora Mavor Moore Award–nominated writing for the stage has been produced across Canada, in the US, and in translation in Germany. They are also the author of several books of drama, poetry, and fiction, most recently the short story collection Faithful and Other Stories (Guernica Editions). Honours include the CBC Short Story Prize and the Toronto Arts Foundation's Emerging Artist Award.

Book preview

Title page: Plenitude, Poems by Daniel Sarah Karasik. Published by Book*hug Press, Toronto 2022. The title type is overlaid on a crumpled paper.

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Sarah Karasik

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Plenitude / Daniel Sarah Karasik.

Names: Karasik, Daniel, 1986– author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021037585X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210375868

ISBN 9781771667357 (softcover)

ISBN 9781771667364 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781771667371 (PDF)

Classification: LCC PS8621.A6224 P54 2022 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

Logos: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, government of Canada, Ontario Creates

Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet, work, and learn on this territory.

Logo: Book*hug Press

For my comrades.

Stylized text, slightly crooked, reading: Contents

messianic time

1

radiant incipience

energy

stages of grief

make/work

Against the Law

scratch

Among Other White Jews

silences

Regarding the Prophetic Tradition

2

trans-socialist

3

Plenitude

hustle

Tóngzhì

Dysphoria, Smoothed

portrait of the autist as a young whatever

riding

warning

anything you want

Closet Exits Camouflaged

tough but fair

Spilling Over

4

burrow

containment

Unseen

wager

Rothko/Lupron

civility

float

June to August

faintly

A Sense of History

Place

5

prima donna

Where Tear Gas Can’t Reach

Visible to Vanishing

Tight Pants

either/or

Spectacle

Degenerate

Transparencies

innocence isn’t the opposite of violence

Crow

doing what you’re supposed to

6

rehearsal

lines

for Chile, on the day after a status-quo federal election in the Canadian state

movement

manifest

a simile is more honest than a metaphor thank you no questions at this time

Notes and Acknowledgements

About the Author

Colophon

messianic time

imagine there were no oppression to shape our identities. instead: limitless forms of descriptive difference not essentialized and politicized by violence. if we were to say I in such a world, we might mean almost nothing but a historied, futured, networked locus of desire

Black and white image of the part title showing a large number "1" against a brick wall background. The wall is full of graffiti.

radiant incipience

and if some came to say trans rights

and others