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A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2012)What is the best Love you've ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you're busy, you're a poet with a penny in your mouth. . . . Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.
CAConrad's (Soma)tic exercises desire to literally crack open existence as we know it. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is an essential how-to book for anyone interested in breaking through their perceived limitations to become a more politically and physically engaged writer. Incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process, these twenty-seven exercises and their corresponding poems confirm Conrad's unwavering belief in poetry as a necessary practice for being.
CAConrad, a 2011 PEW Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five books of poetry, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
CAConrad's (Soma)tic exercises desire to literally crack open existence as we know it. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is an essential how-to book for anyone interested in breaking through their perceived limitations to become a more politically and physically engaged writer. Incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process, these twenty-seven exercises and their corresponding poems confirm Conrad's unwavering belief in poetry as a necessary practice for being.
CAConrad, a 2011 PEW Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five books of poetry, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 2012
25 people are currently reading
1515 people want to read
About the author
C.A. Conrad
45 books593 followersCAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays the latest While Standing In Line For Death is forthcoming from Wave Books in September 2017. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Ojbect and Ucross. For his books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
June 29, 2017
i have finished reading this book but i don't want to take it off my currently-reading shelf. it's one of those books that when you finish, it's still not finished with you. more than any other book i've read, it is about process. it contains photocopies of CAConrad's notes, the germs of exercises he poses for finding new ways into poetry. the base matter has always been there, but Conrad draws new maps to access them. he shows us what the poetry landscape looked like when he was there but that doesn't mean it will look the same for you. and he does expect you to take part. it's interactive. there is a need for poetry in an aching and cruel world full of war and pain. he wants everyone to join him and he teaches us how to make our own way into poetry, not pedagogically, but by example. if you are lucky enough to begin this book, you will never finish it. it is ongoing and will live inside of you like something refreshing and inspiring, constantly renewing hope that war and pain are only one aspect to a life full of wonder and discovery.
May 31, 2016
Bless the book designer for publishing this with vanilla bean covers and big, porous tracts of pages: this book is built to collect stains. For a compilation of somatic challenges meant excise concerns of respectability from a writing practice--how we engage "the muscle that bends language" (yes!)--it only seems right for the body of this text to show scars and fluids, too. I have to shout while reading CA Conrad or else I'm wasting my time. When I read CA Conrad, I feel a little less afraid of the caps lock, of any demonstration of emphasis.
This book is a good one to have sex on top of. It's a good reminder to be brave. It's a good reminder of how much body we're lucky to forget and return to.
This book is a good one to have sex on top of. It's a good reminder to be brave. It's a good reminder of how much body we're lucky to forget and return to.
April 25, 2012
"Alice Notley was/not married to/Ted Hughes stop/talking like/that around me"
"what I really want/is to scatter/my own/ashes"
We can become poetry and CAConrad offers procedures to wear poems as skin. Much of the book expands beyond the poems into descriptions of exercises that generated the poems, such as cooking and eating a Jim Brody poem or rubbing dirt from outside Emily Dickinson's house all over your body. The poems, socially activated and wisely enraged, constantly find joy in language and friends as engagements in and around a life immersed in acts of creating poetry. His send ups to Jim Brody, Frank O'Hara, and a boyfriend who died of AIDs are especially fantastic.
"what I really want/is to scatter/my own/ashes"
We can become poetry and CAConrad offers procedures to wear poems as skin. Much of the book expands beyond the poems into descriptions of exercises that generated the poems, such as cooking and eating a Jim Brody poem or rubbing dirt from outside Emily Dickinson's house all over your body. The poems, socially activated and wisely enraged, constantly find joy in language and friends as engagements in and around a life immersed in acts of creating poetry. His send ups to Jim Brody, Frank O'Hara, and a boyfriend who died of AIDs are especially fantastic.
November 27, 2024
if you’re going to write a book about how slathering your forehead with your boyfriend’s spunk makes you write better poetry, the poetry should (probably) be good.
it is so aggressively and aggravatingly average. all that…for this? idk. i’m disappointed. doesn’t ever warrant the extremes to which CAConrad wants you to go, even when the philosophical core here is something worth talking about and interacting with. yes, we should find the divine or be reborn (soma) in our flesh (somatic). we should activate in our bodies a recognition of all the little miracles that make life what it is.
but where they lose me is in the process. i want writers to experience and write about it; not experience IN ORDER TO write about it. this book is a manual of unconventional rituals they want you to practice only to write through them. but then their lines are just mashed up and beaten and strained through this practice to such an extent that they lose any meaningful heartbeat or recognizable life, even when trying to accent both, when it’s trying so hard to be unique and intemperate and insurgent against the status quo. there is no mission here other than the somatic exercises — for one example, sitting naked on a chair coated with whipped cream — which simply come across as ignorant to the constraints of reality, despite conrad’s self-proclaimed “third eye” to all manners of horror in the world. it’s laughably incongruent in that way. it’s ridiculous.
the most common criticism of this book and of CAConrad more generally is the “nastiness,” the strangeness, and i want to make it clear that’s not my stance at all. i didn’t mind its interest in depravity, i’d even say it might be the quality of the book i loved the most. more literature should be gross — it’s INTERESTING. but grossness falls so flat here because nothing generative is done with it. it’s for shock value. that’s where the problem sits, in whipped cream or not.
just glad it’s over. eileen myles did it better, and even they weren’t the first.
it is so aggressively and aggravatingly average. all that…for this? idk. i’m disappointed. doesn’t ever warrant the extremes to which CAConrad wants you to go, even when the philosophical core here is something worth talking about and interacting with. yes, we should find the divine or be reborn (soma) in our flesh (somatic). we should activate in our bodies a recognition of all the little miracles that make life what it is.
but where they lose me is in the process. i want writers to experience and write about it; not experience IN ORDER TO write about it. this book is a manual of unconventional rituals they want you to practice only to write through them. but then their lines are just mashed up and beaten and strained through this practice to such an extent that they lose any meaningful heartbeat or recognizable life, even when trying to accent both, when it’s trying so hard to be unique and intemperate and insurgent against the status quo. there is no mission here other than the somatic exercises — for one example, sitting naked on a chair coated with whipped cream — which simply come across as ignorant to the constraints of reality, despite conrad’s self-proclaimed “third eye” to all manners of horror in the world. it’s laughably incongruent in that way. it’s ridiculous.
the most common criticism of this book and of CAConrad more generally is the “nastiness,” the strangeness, and i want to make it clear that’s not my stance at all. i didn’t mind its interest in depravity, i’d even say it might be the quality of the book i loved the most. more literature should be gross — it’s INTERESTING. but grossness falls so flat here because nothing generative is done with it. it’s for shock value. that’s where the problem sits, in whipped cream or not.
just glad it’s over. eileen myles did it better, and even they weren’t the first.
Read
November 24, 2012As a natural contrarian to general consensus, I should probably slam this book. But fuck no. It's a thunderclap that lives up to the exceptional treatment WAVE has given it and which announces CA as someone we need to listen to in ways that his previous two books just couldn't.
Reading and evaluating this book just by the lineated poems is an insanity as the book puts forward so many times in the poems themselves, the exercise descriptions and larger, generous syntax of the book itself the idea that the poetic act is complex aesthetic-social-political gesture that occurs on AND off the page, between sensory experience and cognition, between the individual and the community. It's not a book of poetry, it's not a bunch of creative writing exercises, it's not a manifesto, it's alive between these things.
It's interesting to see people respond to this, like all books ahead/out of their times, by wondering if it is a joke.
Reading and evaluating this book just by the lineated poems is an insanity as the book puts forward so many times in the poems themselves, the exercise descriptions and larger, generous syntax of the book itself the idea that the poetic act is complex aesthetic-social-political gesture that occurs on AND off the page, between sensory experience and cognition, between the individual and the community. It's not a book of poetry, it's not a bunch of creative writing exercises, it's not a manifesto, it's alive between these things.
It's interesting to see people respond to this, like all books ahead/out of their times, by wondering if it is a joke.
August 16, 2014
"DO NOT HESITATE to write the most brutal things that come to mind, HESITATE at nothing for that matter."
"I'm tired of poetry not saving the world"
Me too. I love this book.
"I'm tired of poetry not saving the world"
Me too. I love this book.
Read
January 16, 2015not sure what I just read but I dig it
August 20, 2023
genius genius genius never have I read something so delicious and freeing
January 21, 2013
This book is like seeing inside of Conrad's poetry, the guts, the inner workings, the immense luxury of being told where a poem began, how exactly its seed was birthed into lines, and then fast-forwarding to the fully realized version, the poem proper. If poetics had a womb with a translucent facade, and we could look in uninhibited, it would be this book.
May 2, 2012
loving you always CA.
November 4, 2012
Write and read with our bodies
December 2, 2016
"My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If Poetry doesn't strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will."
July 27, 2017
I was drawn to CA Conrad after watching them speak on YouTube and into this cantankerous activist mom persona that's going on. This book gave me a chance to engage with it properly and was a bit too much of an immersion. I mean that in more ways than in being reluctant to rub a banana all over my body in order to make a poem. Another friend of mine said they had to stop reading because CA's voice started echoing in their head after a while screaming MOTHER FED YOU or whatever it might be.
At first I was into the upfront politics, and I found the candidness of anger and despair refreshing. But after getting into this book I started feeling like (queer politics pitfall alert) it was becoming more about form than about content. Lamentations about seas of tombstones start to feel like imagic devices more than protestations after a little while, because CA treats the good things in life with the same ALL-CAPS incommensurability. There's also this neocolonial vibe in all the discussions of crystals and chakras and banana-smearing, tropical rainforest envisaging. It seems unchecked.
It seems to me that through these post-Dada (is that wank to make that connection?) exercises - (soma)tics, as they are called - CA's aim is to cast a poetic landscape that is both internal and external, and the biggest way of doing that is by breaking down numbings or conventions or habits or structures that come between them and the experience of that poetic landscape. But I'm like, if that's the goal, where is the criticality of settler colonialism using like these 'Aztec Tryptophan', eating dark choc while youre doing it?
Of course, some of the poems are really astounding. I'm thinking of the Yellow one from the food colour series (I remember 'our heavy metal roots are never resting plough blades'). But a lot of the poetry washed into itself for me. The (soma)tics are the main star, and even they plateau quite early: notes become notes become notes. I would expect more diverse ways of producing words for the length of this book, and the diversity of physical exercises it suggests. There are so many ways of writing a poem and like taking notes then shaping them is just one? Sometimes I do it in a breath that comes after unthought-of (soma)tics which just arise from my day. I would have appreciated more philosophy in this book. lol.
Now I'M a cantankerous mum, but ultimately this work became tonally jarring for me. I also hate ecosexualism HAH
At first I was into the upfront politics, and I found the candidness of anger and despair refreshing. But after getting into this book I started feeling like (queer politics pitfall alert) it was becoming more about form than about content. Lamentations about seas of tombstones start to feel like imagic devices more than protestations after a little while, because CA treats the good things in life with the same ALL-CAPS incommensurability. There's also this neocolonial vibe in all the discussions of crystals and chakras and banana-smearing, tropical rainforest envisaging. It seems unchecked.
It seems to me that through these post-Dada (is that wank to make that connection?) exercises - (soma)tics, as they are called - CA's aim is to cast a poetic landscape that is both internal and external, and the biggest way of doing that is by breaking down numbings or conventions or habits or structures that come between them and the experience of that poetic landscape. But I'm like, if that's the goal, where is the criticality of settler colonialism using like these 'Aztec Tryptophan', eating dark choc while youre doing it?
Of course, some of the poems are really astounding. I'm thinking of the Yellow one from the food colour series (I remember 'our heavy metal roots are never resting plough blades'). But a lot of the poetry washed into itself for me. The (soma)tics are the main star, and even they plateau quite early: notes become notes become notes. I would expect more diverse ways of producing words for the length of this book, and the diversity of physical exercises it suggests. There are so many ways of writing a poem and like taking notes then shaping them is just one? Sometimes I do it in a breath that comes after unthought-of (soma)tics which just arise from my day. I would have appreciated more philosophy in this book. lol.
Now I'M a cantankerous mum, but ultimately this work became tonally jarring for me. I also hate ecosexualism HAH
October 2, 2023
exercises are often incoherent, many are excessively morbid or sexual. advocates some perhaps questionable behavior (masturbating in a museum? astral projecting during an MRI?) and wraps it all in a blanket of new age spirituality (ALL. THE. CRYSTAL. WATER.) perhaps i am just a cynic but many of these “exercises” felt more like fetish fantasy than poetic practice (given prominent motifs of sexual exhibitionism, feet, bodily fluids, and filth [dirt, garbage]). i also found the preoccupation with death exceptionally disturbing (predicting your death, imagining your death, simulating drowning in your own bathtub) and presented in a way that seemed poetically incoherent. to say this read was a displeasure would be an understatement. i want whatever the author was smoking/tripping on when they came up with some of this stuff.
January 11, 2018
the book's composed of three parts: (1.)the (soma)tic exercises that Conrad uses to generate the (2.) poetry and (3.) errata that's scattered throughout (interviews, reproductions of notebook pages, etc.).
the poetry is imho not terribly interesting and, by itself, does little to vouch for the exercises, which are much livelier, not that I would, personally, sit in my apartment naked and stare at a weeks' worth of trash for hours to write a poem. given the powerful autobiographical material (the murder of Conrad's boyfriend), predictably the text that leaned in an autobiographical direction made much more of an impression, whereas the non- did not
the poetry is imho not terribly interesting and, by itself, does little to vouch for the exercises, which are much livelier, not that I would, personally, sit in my apartment naked and stare at a weeks' worth of trash for hours to write a poem. given the powerful autobiographical material (the murder of Conrad's boyfriend), predictably the text that leaned in an autobiographical direction made much more of an impression, whereas the non- did not
October 2, 2024
i read excerpts from “the right to manifest manifesto” which explained c.a. conrads’ somatic poetry exercises (everything has creative viability, the most vital ingredient for change is creativity) and prompt-driven writing practice. interesting! quite odd! not 100% for me i think
sometimes tender (“kissing eliminates / fusion of / agitation and / dreams / folded in the / days these / surprising / moments / with you”) and often funny (“a beautiful poem should / help you rob a bank / that’s its job / everything has a job”).
sometimes tender (“kissing eliminates / fusion of / agitation and / dreams / folded in the / days these / surprising / moments / with you”) and often funny (“a beautiful poem should / help you rob a bank / that’s its job / everything has a job”).
August 28, 2024
"It's ALL collaboration. Anyone who ever fed you, loved you, anyone who ever made you feel unworthy, stupid, ugly, anyone who ever made you express doubt or assuredness, every one of these helped make you. Those who learn to speak with authority to mask their own self-loathing, those may be the deepest influences on us."
July 12, 2017
I went to the very
Real bank with
A gun for the
Fiction of
Money
A beautiful poem should
Help you rob a bank
that's its job
CAConrad must truly be experienced to be believed.
Real bank with
A gun for the
Fiction of
Money
A beautiful poem should
Help you rob a bank
that's its job
CAConrad must truly be experienced to be believed.
December 6, 2022
“what i really want is to scatter my own ashes”
i have this feeling that i will read conrad’s poems again someday in the future when i’m out on my own & i will understand them just a little bit more & i will stain the pages with coffee & it will be wonderful.
i have this feeling that i will read conrad’s poems again someday in the future when i’m out on my own & i will understand them just a little bit more & i will stain the pages with coffee & it will be wonderful.
June 7, 2017
I am awake and dreaming, once again.
Today, I was able to look in the mirror and said, "Hey! There you are."
CA Conrad is a magician, making ugliness beautiful, and the mundane, insane.
Today, I was able to look in the mirror and said, "Hey! There you are."
CA Conrad is a magician, making ugliness beautiful, and the mundane, insane.
July 2, 2017
the best book .
February 19, 2018
Everything CA Conrad has produced has been a joy to read. This is a stunning book.
January 11, 2021
This was a whirlwind and probably one of my favorite texts I've had to read for college.
10/10, would attach a balloon to a d**** in my v***** again. (FYI, did not actually do this, okay)
10/10, would attach a balloon to a d**** in my v***** again. (FYI, did not actually do this, okay)
January 20, 2024
I read this book for a class! CA Conrad has some crazy somatics in here but it really shows off their creativeness! Their poetry hit A LOT of the time! Worth the read and some uncomfortableness!
April 12, 2025
Good but not my favorite from CA! Especially considering how much they totally ruled in Amanda Paradise
August 7, 2025
Conrad always inspires me to write
January 26, 2026
let every poet read this
May 12, 2025
critical text for poets + poetic practices everywhere
May 2, 2012
I picked up this book because the idea of which sounded experimental and interesting to me. CAConrad (against Descartes?) included a number of somatic experiences to inspire himself, hence the collection of (soma)tic poems in this beautifully bound and designed book published by Wave. I will leave other interested readers to find out how each experiment has engaged the poet. What I would like to point out is that, and perhaps the fun part of this book, it is sometimes to hard to judge whether the poet really has written the poems according to the experience or vice versa. This adds an extra layer of inter-play to the book. OK - some words on the poetry itself. I don't feel all poems in the book carry equal weight, and it may be due to the fact that this book of idea is practically hard in execution. Personally, I think the form of the poems in the book could and should vary. Conrad writes all poems in short fragmented lines. At some point, the little descriptions about the experiments even look more interesting than the verse, which looks like first draft of scattered thoughts to me. Having said this, witty and philosophical lines are found every now and then to amuse the readers (random selections below):
"because you're/ having fun does mean you're not going to/ die" (p.4);
"his ass the/ template of/ my life" (p.13);
"my favorite morning/ is not caring if/ blood on sheets/ is yours or mine" (p.20);
"if truth soothes/ soothing was/ not truth's goal" (p.21);
"my pregnancy dream told me/ not born by evicted" (p.24);
"we cannot train/ ourselves to feel less" (p.25);
"you're so hot when/ it's your birthday/ direct/ descendant/ of mud" (p.29);
"I was never weak/ merely outnumbered" (p. 30);
"kissing eliminates/ fusion of/ agitation and/ dreams" (p. 38);
"I must stop/ carrying my/ cave across/ the street" (p.47);
"reality is case sensitive/ for/ the poor" (p. 48);
"in my country it/ is legal to purchase/ items people suffered/ to produce" (p. 49) and
"Apathy/ break from/ room where/ electricity/ hums for/ years" (p. 50).
"because you're/ having fun does mean you're not going to/ die" (p.4);
"his ass the/ template of/ my life" (p.13);
"my favorite morning/ is not caring if/ blood on sheets/ is yours or mine" (p.20);
"if truth soothes/ soothing was/ not truth's goal" (p.21);
"my pregnancy dream told me/ not born by evicted" (p.24);
"we cannot train/ ourselves to feel less" (p.25);
"you're so hot when/ it's your birthday/ direct/ descendant/ of mud" (p.29);
"I was never weak/ merely outnumbered" (p. 30);
"kissing eliminates/ fusion of/ agitation and/ dreams" (p. 38);
"I must stop/ carrying my/ cave across/ the street" (p.47);
"reality is case sensitive/ for/ the poor" (p. 48);
"in my country it/ is legal to purchase/ items people suffered/ to produce" (p. 49) and
"Apathy/ break from/ room where/ electricity/ hums for/ years" (p. 50).
May 5, 2012
I had the fun opportunity of contributing to an interview with CAConrad about this book, which isn't out yet (the, uh, interview I mean), but still gave me a good opportunity to read it closely on a very busy weekend. There's a lot to consider here about this book AS a book-qua-book, and there are a lot of ways in which it's a lot brasher and louder about itself in that regard than most contemporary poetry-- see for example the interview in the back or the appendix of reviews Conrad has done. But all of this is extremely likable and, more importantly, cements that Conrad is trying to establish a new mode of writing with this book instead of just, you know, putting out some poems.
Really ambitious, really audacious, and I'm sure you could hate it and not necessarily be in the wrong. But I like it, a lot, and urge you to try it out.
Really ambitious, really audacious, and I'm sure you could hate it and not necessarily be in the wrong. But I like it, a lot, and urge you to try it out.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews