Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs is thrilled to present the first iteration of a brand new event series — We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense, a live, shape-shifting series that defies genre and expectation brought to you by poet Christine Larusso & writer and curator (and current UNDO Fellow!) Rachael Rakes! WS2DOATN is not quite ekphrasis, not quite reading, not quite performance—rather, it’s a porous and unpredictable encounter between words, sounds, moving images, and everything else that slips through.

In June, we’ll be thinking about: 💫Failure💫

This edition features Mike Lala, Meg Fernandes, and Séamus Isaac Fey, whose contributions will shape and respond to the theme in real time.

Each edition begins with the prompt of one word or phrase —from English and several other languages, which will be turned about through the program—with the composition of works, live performances, and other interjections openly combining with the desperate hells and imaginaries of the day. From this, we aim to follow the threads that unspool from this combination of fragments, feelings, artworks, and impermanence of the moment, guests, and audience.

Expect loosely held structure, provisional logic, and a refusal to resolve. We’ll be thinking out loud in the company of fragments, feedback, and fleeting forms, come through!

Bios

Mike Lala grew up in the western United States and Tokyo, and lives in New York.

He is the author of the poetry volumes The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023) and Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016); the chapbooks Points of Return, In the Gun Cabinet, and Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama; and a contributing translator to Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula.

Lala’s works for performance and installation include Whale Fall (2021–22, with Iris McCloughan and Nobutaka Aozaki), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), and Infinite Odyssey (2018, with Homer). He has presented work at the 92nd Street Y (for Anne Carson’s Tenth Muse), The Knitting Factory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, New Ohio Theatre, Pioneer Works, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, The Tank NYC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans.Fernandes has work published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, theAcademy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015) and Good Boys (Tin House, 2020). Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), was published in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is represented by Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group.

Séamus Isaac Fey (he/they) is a Trans writer from Chicago. Currently, he is the poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine, and co creative director at Rock Pocket Productions. His debut poetry collection, decompose, is out with Not a Cult Media. He has an essay forthcoming in Dopamine Press’ WITCH anthology, edited by Michelle Tea. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Offing, Sonora Review, and others. He loves to beat his friends at Mario Party. Find him online @sfeycreates.

Rachael Rakes is a writer, curator, educator, and researcher. She was recently the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2023. Currently Rakes is a Committee Member of the New York Film Festival, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Contributing Editor for INFRASONICA.With Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe, she organizes the artistic research initiative on co-subjective encounters, Counter-Encounters. From 2019–2022 she was the Curator for Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Until 2019, she was the Head Curator and Manager of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam. Rakes teaches in the Artificial Times Masters department at Sandberg, on Curating the moving image at Leiden University, and taught recently for the Parsons School of Art, Zine Eskola, HKU, KASK, Eugene Lang College, and Harvard University. Rakes is editor of the publications This, Too, Is a Map (2023, Sema/[NAME]), Toward the Not-Yet (2021, BAK/MIT Press), and Practice Space (2019, [NAME]/De Appel) and frequently publishes as a critic and essayist.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Wildness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is the 2017 winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, and has been named a finalist for both the Orlando Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poem, “Lunar Understanding,” was nominated for a Pushcart. She is a Producer for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace. She moved home to Los Angeles after spending a decade in Brooklyn.