Celebrating The Cloud Notebook by Ada Smailbegović in NYC and Providence

Can a sky or a shape that moves at another pace or rhythm be a kind
of memorial for another that moves at a pace yet faster or slower than
itself?

 

— The Cloud Notebook

Brimming with precise and expansive reflections on history, memory, ecology, The Cloud Notebook is finally here!

The debut collection of poet and theorist Ada Smailbegović explores how languages and objects come to compose worlds, as well as carry traces of dislocated and disappearing worlds. It unfolds as a long poem and assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a “migrant orientation,” a continuous problematic of narrative unfolding and fractured meaning. Deeply engaged with the material and sensual qualities of language, and the philosophical qualities of matter, The Cloud Notebook is at once playful, probing, elegiac, and humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic. It is, what Lucy Ives describes “an intensely trained and liberatory vision,” yielding “a series of accessible philosophies of rescue, dreaming, guessing, worship, description, hosting, mending.”

We are thrilled to celebrate Ada and The Cloud Notebook with three fantastic events coming up this Spring:

We hope to see you at one, two or all three!

Copies of The Cloud Notebook are now available on here.

Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and living in a series of geographical displacements between Providence, Vancouver and New York. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. She is a cofounder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Select critical and poetic works have included “Of Poodles, Mockingbirds and Beetles: Gertrude Stein’s Zoopoetics” (College Literature, 2019), “From Code to Shape” (differences, 2018), The Forest / On Waiting (Doublecross Press, 2017), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015) and “Of the Dense and Rare” (Triple Canopy, 2013). Her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2021.