Description:

Please join the English department & the Poetry & Poetics cluster, as part of the UNSETTLING SOUND event series, in celebrating PhD student Temperance Aghamohammadi upon the release of her new book "BATTALION SHAPED GIRL" at a reading with Chicago poet, Kai Ihns (Author of "Of").

This year, our event series is "Unsettling Sound." Unsettling Sound foregrounds the entanglement between poetics and sound to explore the integral, esoteric, and, occasionally, uncomfortable manner in which sound contributes to and develops expressive meaning. Defining sound as vibrational and only sometimes including audio, we track the vibrations and resonances between text-based and non-text-based arts. Unsettling Sound asks: What is the sound of poetry? What makes poetry sound? What are the new and vanguard interventions in the dark matter between language and sonority? Shepherding together inquiries into text, music, translation, embodiment, performance, and materialities, Unsettling Sound stewards the development of poetic practices in sounding and listening, critically and creatively, in both orthodox and unorthodox ways. 

Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE,  2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her critical work is situated at the intersection of experimental poetry & poetics, as well as sound studies. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.

Kai Ihns is a poet and filmmaker based in Chicago, where she recently completed a PhD at UChicago, studying a form of attentional prosody she calls “aspect choreography” in contemporary experimental poetry and film. She is the author of two books of poems, sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020), and Of (The Elephants, forthcoming fall 2024), as well as several pamphlets, most recently GREEN SKY (slub press, 2023), and Wednesday (The Creative Writing Department, 2023). She’s worked as an editor at Chicago Review and Fence, and currently helps with poetry and the Daily Poem email at The Paris Review.