 Hello. Welcome. Thanks for being here. It's now 12.12. So we'll get started. Before I begin, hi. Sorry. My name is Noah. I'm directing Lunch Pums this season. And it's really a pleasure to have you all in here. If you could silence your cell phone before we get started. That would make everyone's experience just powdery. And I want to thank the library, the English department, and ETS, and the Arts Research Council for their support of Lunch Pums this year. They make this magic happen. And thank you for coming out and being such a good audience to our readers. Sophia Sinclair's Cannibal arrives first as a worm in the ear, a problem in the mouth. Its first poem, Home, lays out the ground. Have I forgotten it? Sinclair asks. Wild conch shell dialect, black apostrophe curled, tight on my tongue. With the conch shell, that oceanic ear, she deploys in those four lines a snaking circuit of listening, reading, eating, and speaking. As this is a deeply read collection that devours its way through the canon, Shakespeare first. Black apostrophe curled, tight on my tongue, asks to be read as at once the inky punctuation mark with its questions of ownership about to be consumed. And as the figure of a dress about to uncurl, black apostrophe, black speech to an absent person. And as we are consumed by cannibal, we discover that this double being of ink and breath of taking in and producing lies deep at the root of its thinking about language, about femininity, about Jamaican place, exile, and identity. It's a book that's as powered by the written edge of its wit, its sharp quatrains and tercets, its world play, the enjambments and triple meanings that we can only fully catch when we see them in print. As it is by its oral qualities, its propulsive oceanic rhythms and that elusive quality we might call charisma or voice. Listen, for instance, to the complex internal rhymes, the powerful O's and R's of this speaker, a self-sufficient Eve slash Anaconda, a species which we might know can reproduce without a male. Womb, I boast a vogue sacrosanctum, engorging shored pornography's, the cells unruly strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years, my wings pinned wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display. Eve, in Sinclair's version, is the tempter snake, is, through this virgin birth, a heretical reptilian Mary. And we can hear how this reclaimed myth toys with our expectations of clarity, whips language to a proliferating sound, whereas we expect vague sacrosanctum or served vogue in place of the more logical shared pornography's, it's shored. There is many ways into cannibal as there are virtues in the book. It luxuriates in sensory detail as it reconstructs the Jamaica of childhood. It savages the noxious texts and politics of Thomas Jefferson's and our Virginia. It excavates the allure and the toll of whiteness and social contexts. It liberates and exalts in the menacing sexuality packaged with black femininity. There are also moving and shrewd reflections on family and its disintegrations, on poverty, on the enchanted marginalized lives lived through the Jamaican folk religions, Pocomania and Rastafari. Nor is this to mention the ways Sinclair's keen ear tightens and unspools meeters or how she dances within and without the pressures of fixed stanzas. But in closing, one thing I was struck by this reading was the preponderance of the prefix on amid the restless linguistic creativity everywhere in this book. From the first line of Pocomania, father unbending, father unbroken, father, to the masterwork poem, the art of unselfing, to nonce words such as unfossiled and unjungle, and the gamut of unmoors and unburied. This pattern hints, I think, at the sheer range of antitheses, of oppressions that this book must undo, unfang, as it pushes toward original expression. The poem unselfing, for instance, suggests that epistemologically, even the idea of a stable self can be a corpse around one's neck, which it rejects instead for the flux of unmaking and remaking, instant to instant. Relatedly, I hear also in these unwords, a poignant recognition of poetry's potential failure, of how the power of language and rhetoric to actually ameliorate the world is only ever paper thin. A line like father unbending, father unbroken, father is so touching because it is a via negativa. The words offering us proud and gentle, a frank lie. Sophia Sinclair is the author of Cannibal and also the forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon with Simon and Schuster this coming August. Her many honors include a Whiting Award, a Metcalph Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her work appears broadly, and she's an associate professor of creative writing at the Arizona State University. It's my pleasure to welcome Sophia Sinclair. Wow, thank you so much Noah for that wonderful introduction. You know, I've heard many of them over the years and I would say that's up there as one of the best ones. Thank you so much. Thank you to Berkeley for hosting me, to the Morrison Library, and to all of you for coming out to hear poems at noon. I am gonna be reading some poems from Cannibal and I think some new poems as well, a few. Noah, you already like read half the poems, I was kidding. So I'll start by reading some poems from Cannibal and the book is called Cannibal because of the linguistic history of the word. The word Cannibal is the English variant of the Spanish word Caribal which comes from the word cannibal, a reference to the native Caribbean people whom Columbus thought it human flesh and from whom the word Caribbean originates. So by virtue of being Caribbean, all West Indian people like me are already in a purely linguistic sense, born savage. This is home. Have I forgotten it? Wild conch shell dialect, black apostrophe curled tight on my tongue, or how the Spanish built walls of broken glass to keep me out, but the doctor bird kept chasing and raking me in. This place is your place, reefed in red sargassum, ancient driftwood nursed on the pensive sea, the ramshackle altar I visited often, packed full with fish skull bright with lignum-vitey plumes. Father, I have asked so many miracles of it to be patient and forgiving, to be remade for you in some small wonder. And what a joy to still believe in anything. My diction now as straight as my hair, that stranger we've long stopped searching for. But if somehow our half sunken hearts could answer, I would cup my mouth in warm bowls over the earth and kiss the wet dirt of home. Taste bogue mud and one long orange peel for skin. I'd open my ear for sugarcane and the long stalks of gungo peas to climb in. I'd swim the sea, still lapsing in its solid frame, the sea that again and again, calls out my name. This next poem is called Pocomania. And as Noah gestured to Pocomania, also called Cumina is a Jamaican folk religion that involves dancing and chanting as a way of communing with the past and with the dead. And it's actually a cultural movement that is in danger of kind of going extinct. It's not as practiced as much anymore in Jamaica. And so I tried to preserve something of the Cumina Pocomania ritual in this poem through the rhythm and tempo. This is Pocomania. Father on bending, father on broken, father with the low hanging belly, father I was cleaved from, pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged in the fire of yourself, ripped my veins skinned, one eyelid, father my black tangle of hair and teeth, born yellowed and wrinkled, father your jackfruit, foster my overripe flesh. Father your first daughter, pardon me. Father your first daughter now severed at the ankles, father your black machete. I remember your slick smell, your sea dark, your rum froth wailed and smeared my wet jelly across your cheek. Father forgive my impossible demands. I conjure you in woven town, line of Judah, father your red, gold and green, father a flag I am waving, father a flag I am burning, father skittering in on a boat of whale skeleton, his body wrapped in white like an orthodox priest, father and his nest of acolyte women, his beard coma, his primrose, his dahlia, his Nagasaki blossom, mother and I were none of them. Father wash me in eucalyptus, in garlic, in golden seal, fathering my exorcism, father the harsh brine of my sea, making sounds only the heart can feel. Father a burrowing insect, his small incision, no bleat but a warm gurgle, daughter entering this world a host. Father your beeched animal, your lamentations in the sand, mother her red bones come knocking, mother her red bones come knocking at the floorboards, my mother not knocking at his skull when he dreams, scratching at your door my dry rattle of morse code, Father let me in with the mash mount spirits who enter us, father the split fibula where the marrow must rust, father the soft drum in my ear, daughter unwedding her familiar mischief, mother jangling the rib cage, I am here, let's see, I'll read. This poem is called Mermaid. Mermaid. Caribbean time is 10 times stronger than the English variety. Just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy who couldn't yank a Jamaican weed from her rose garden that didn't grow back thick, 10 fold and blackened with the furor of a violated man. The tip of American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet and plant the proud seed of your shame tree. Don't let them say it never grew. Roll that saltfish barrel down the hill sending that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled by her long earrings at our sea, 10 times bluer than any blue eye. That minty whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than liquor and takes six spoons of sugar, please. What can I say? My great grandfather's blood was clotted thick with sugarcane and overproof rum and when he bled it trickled heavy like molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red ant from the grill to Frenchman's Cove came to burrow and suckle at his vein where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic rot and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing net, he served her up cold to his wild eyed son, mermaid on the deck. This next poem is one that Noah also mentioned in his intro and I wrote it while I was getting my PhD at USC and I remember being in the program and feeling very frustrated with the syllabus that I was being asked to contend with because I had felt like at that point I had done so much schooling that I arrived at my PhD and was kind of dismayed to find that that the syllabus I was being asked to read was the same, the same old dead white men and in this class I took on Victorian literature, it seemed that the professors would always have a very unverified reading list and they would throw in one block author and in particular it always seemed to be WB Du Bois and in this class, even in a class on Victorian literature, the one black author they included was WB Du Bois and so I kind of decided that in these classes I would try to make them work for me and I would try to find something in the class that I could, from which a poem could bloom and so during this course I discovered that Victorian women were forbidden from practicing botany because the men thought that the cross sections of plants and flowers to close the resembled female genitalia and so I was like, okay, yeah, I could definitely make that work for me and so this poem kind of bloomed from that thought. This is Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda. I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei from mischief of man redacted. I came and coming, fasting, carving, carved myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I twice discarded, arrived thornside and soon outgrew his reptilian sheen, a fine specimen. Let me have it, something in violet, splayed in bird lime, legs and exposed anemone against jailbait August, its x-ray sky. This light, a gorgon slick, polygamous doom and God again calling much too late who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable. His primal plant remains elusive, wildfire and pathogen, blood knot of human fleshed there in his beard. How I am hot for it. Call me murderous, a glowing engine timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow, let me have it. This maiden head primeval schemes what ovule of cruel invention, the venus trap, the menses. And how many ways to announce this guilt, whore's nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata, womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum, engorging shored pornographies, the cells unruly strain, rogue empire, multiplying for a thousand, virile thousand years. My wings tend wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display came. I'll read, as no one mentioned, I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia for a short time when I was getting my mastas. And I got there from Jamaica and I was so stunned by so many of the things I encountered there that there was no other way to make sense of it, except to put it on the page. I remember getting there and everybody in Charlottesville was adamant that they weren't in the South. And I was like, okay, maybe I don't know anything, but Robert E. Lee was still, the statue was still up in the park. A lot of students walk around and mention Thomas Jefferson as T.J. without irony, they call him T.J. People would still ask in meetings when something was gonna be built on campus. What would T.J. want? What would T.J. do? And I was like, where am I? You're like, what's happening? So I wrote a series of poems in the book called Notes on the State of Virginia, which is, of course, Thomas Jefferson wrote a text of the same name. And so this is the first of that series. Notes on the State of Virginia, one. Child of the colonies, carrying the swift waves of oceans inside of you, the wide dark of centuries, the whole world plunged down, sewn through the needle's eye, the old crows glisten in your gullet, eyes beatling through black. You wear your mother's face in the mirror, your mouth closed around all those pills like teeth, each one so heavy, your tongue falls numb. Think of your friend who only wanted you to find sleep whose face asked you not to choose the worst. Dull wretch, slack jaw orphan, you always feel sorry for yourself. And swallow each capsule like the last pearl your grandfather pressed into your palm. How he had dived three whole days for it. Your grandfather who loved you, but could not say it. All the men who love you and cannot say it. Jamaica, old fur sticking to the roof of my mouth, the one long dream that holds me on the water, black centipede I still teave on, ruined train clattering through my track. Here I could come up for air. Here I could wake with a name I can answer to, where Thomas Jefferson learned how to belittle a thing, how to own it. He created the word and wanted my mouth to know it. He wanted the whole world pulled through me on a fishing string, where I will find my fingers in the muscle of my throat, where I will marvel at the body asking to live. I'll read one more Virginia poem. And I, this is about the street I lived on. The neighbor at the end of my street when I got there had a Confederate flag flying. And then he also put up a Gadsden flag, which I didn't even know what that was until I came to America. I'm always learning the new names and symbols of hate, that's my American education. So the Gadsden flag is this flag with the snake on it that says don't tread on me. That of course recently has been co-opted by all sorts of hateful groups. And so this poem is a little bit about living on that street. Another white Christmas in Virginia. The house at the end of my street has been looming all winter, perched garishly through the sour season, pepper lights slinking red, gold in its wake, heralding the sign of its own coronation, its million-chittering fires, Chevy pickup colony declaring the sidewalk. This, their own white sky, old names they refuse to bury. The whole yard a boisterous spectacle. I long to set fire to all of it. The glimmering reindeer, fat snowman inflating his visible lung, ghost child ringing his one horse bell through the night, that bright harassment of Santas. The idea of America burning holes in the lawn. Who could live here? With enough mirth to power my city, enough of myself haunting me in some other place. Nonetheless, one matchstick man comes and goes on their horizon, walking hard on his invisible horse, Confederate buckle stroke kicking toothpick silences. No words ever pass between us as he hoists and pulleys his large flag, daily hanging and freezing through the verbless rubble of these months, determined as an eagle clawing at its steady rituals. Don't tread on me. Still, I am resolved to come friendly, built and nested my cowboy greeting, torched it out into his world and watched it choke, soundless, watched it die with my good foot caught in their blue hydrangeas. The hawk wife watching, spies me, smiling, waving in their driveway of angels, but swoops up her children and says nothing and retreats from some darkening on the horizon, some fast approaching plague. Clap if you feel like clap, we're saying Jameek. Thank you. Okay, I'll read, let's see, maybe I'll read a new poem. So I'll read a new poem. I've been working on a series of poems called Sophia, the Robot. And I don't know if anyone knows of this, there's this robot called Sophia, built by Hanson Robotics, who was the first robot to be given citizenship by Saudi Arabia, true facts. And so I was, I've been completely intrigued by so many things about that sentence, you know, that a robot is given citizenship in a place where women still don't have full equal rights. And this robot was built by these men to resemble who they thought was the most beautiful woman in the world, Audrey Hepburn. And so the robot has like makeup and eyeshadow, but strangely like no hair. So it's like, it's very uncanny valley. And so I've been writing these poems, thinking about Sophia as like a dark mirror I'm stepping through of thinking about womanhood and thinking about also imagining her as kind of like a bastardization of myself and my own name. And so I'm writing these personal poems about Sophia. This is the first one. Sophia, the Robot contemplates beauty. As a girl, I held the hind legs of the small and terrified. Wanted the short fur and the wet meat furrowing. Wanted the soft cry of the quivering boy at primary school. Rock stone mashed up against his tende head. The sick milk of us poor ones sucked clean from a government issued plastic bag. At lunchtime, the children were lethal and precise. A horde hurling Ben foot at she who was helpless and I waking too surprised to hear my own cruel mouth taunting. Her smile, some handsome forgery of myself. Grateful, even now they cannot see the bald wire patois of my shamdom. Makeshift dreaming the warmth spent in the muscle of the living. The girl I grew inside my head dreaming of a real girl dreaming. I wanted a pearl purse so I stole it. I wanted a real friend so I let him, let her, let him, let him, let him. This beauty I am eager to hoard comes slippery on ordinary days comes not at all comes never. Yet I am a pure shelled thing. Glistening manmade against the wall where one than two fingers entered the first time. Terror dazzling the uncertainty of pleasure. It's God as real as girlhood. This is another one in the series. Sophia, the robot sees her reflection for the first time. First a shadow, then her cellophane hand ripples from the dark neon with the lucent glamour of youth. The past a boundless specter between two mirrors as study our kaleidoscope clear torso of wire my silvering net of hair lip against lip salt from silica. Her face a stretched word called and recalled are once electric life flickering live as copper coils in my mouth. She grows eternal hoisting me through air white shock of Xerox a ghostly doubling her fistful of matter half in the world half chaos making and erasing the womb and its wound. I press my disappearing face into her fibers tattered and thin against our meshes of breath carbon and aluminum flesh and rubber. I lift the hammer Janus sister doppelganger demon growing blue into flame self from other pearl and steel against the glass we shatter retro artifact mother of mothers. I'll read two more. I'll read the art of unselfing, which Noah also mentioned in his intro. And this is a poem just simply about homesickness. And I wrote this one when I was living in Charlottesville and feeling completely out of place and longing for home, the art of unselfing. The mind's black kettle hisses its wild exigencies at every turn the hour before the coffee and the hour after pen scratch of the gone morning woman a pitched hysteria watching the mad aunt scramble her small wants devouring her binge and skin thrall her old cells being shuffled off into labyrinths this birdless sky alonging her mothmouth rabble on facing these touch and go months under winter torn letters under floorboards each fickle moon pecked through with doubt. And once spoiled onion pale cyclops on the kitchen counter sprouting green missives some act of contrition neighbor gods vacuum allowed rule thrown down. Her mother now on the line saying too much. This island is not a martyr you tinker too much with each gone memory your youth and it's on weeding not everything blooms here a private history consider this immutable consider our galloping son it's life your starved homesickness the paper wasp kingdom you set fire to watched for days until it burnt a city in you until a family your hands could not save became the hurricane how love is still on rooting you and how to grow a new body to let each word be the wild rain swallowed pure like an antidote her mother at the airport saying don't come back love your landlocked city money buy a coat and even exile can be glamorous. Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one in particular no answer. Her heart's double vault a muted hydra this hour a purge of its own unselfing she must make a home of it. I forgot why I don't read that poem often. I'll finish with one but I'll say Noah I was intrigued interested in you saying I do this on on construction and that was something I was wrestling with recently with my English with my editors for the memoir they were like no do not say you know unfurled and unreal and unpulled and unselfed it's too much I'm like I'm a poet I want to say it I'll end with this last poem I when I was getting my PhD I had a professor at USC his name is Mark Irwin he called me into his office to tell me that he thought my poems had too much of a female conceit and that I would alienate male readers and editors and I was like okay that's on purpose and I don't care but I somehow gathered the courage to go on writing my poems of little female conceit and sometimes when I read this poem I like to dedicate it to him Mark Irwin at USC this is center of the world the meek inherit nothing God in his tattered coat this morning a quiet tongue in my air begging for alms cold hands reaching up my skirt little lamb poppered flock bless my black tea with tears I have shorn your golden fleece worn vast spools of white lace glittering jacquard gilded fig leaves jeweled dust on my skin corn silk hair in my hams corn silk hair in my hams I have milked the stout beast of what you call America and where your men across my chest like furs stick pin fox and snow blue chinchilla they too came to nibble at my door the soft pink tangles I trapped them in dear watches in the shadows dear thick thide fiends at ease please tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes I have nothing to hide I will spread myself wide hear a flash of muscle hear some blood in the hunt now the center of the world my incandescent cunt all hail the dark blooms of amaryllis and the wild pink Damascus my sweet Aphrodite unfolding in the kink all hail pot jasmine in the night thick syrup in your mouth forked dagger on my tongue legions at my heel hear at the world's red mecca kneel hair Eden hair Bethlehem hair in the cradle of thieves a towering Sphinx roams the garden her wet dawn devouring Sophia thank you that was really really remarkable and if our audience wants to relive the thrills I encourage everyone to purchase a copy of Cannibal with Callie from Pegasus over there. I think Sophia will have some time to sign afterwards. Thank you again to our sponsors. If you want to sign up for our email list it's on the table over there. There's a YouTube channel where you can relive this reading as others and our next reading will be in February on February 2nd with Nobel laureate Louise Glick who will have to have a big act to follow. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.