Doors 7pm
Program 7:30p
Tickets $15

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Welcome to another round of our multimedia series combining live performance, reading, sound and image selected by poet Christine Larusso & writer and curator Rachael Rakes: We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense. It’s not ekphrasis. WS2DOATN is a live series merging words, sounds, and moving images, intended to reframe—or unframe—what constitutes the poetic, the time-based, the time-less, the urgent and endurant in art and discourse

Let us present to you, round four—Divas de Mas Muertas.

A true diva never really dies, does she? It’s October. It’s time to invoke those  merely  departed from this plane, them baddie in our bones, keeping us keeping the flame.  We, the nearly departed, will lay the marigolds on the altar together. Literally, bring your objects, amulets, and spells along.

This edition features readings from poets Dorothea Lasky, Marisa Crawford, & Hafizah Geter alongside Jesse McLean’s short film, Somewhere Only We Know and Cecelia Condit’s Possibly in Michigan.

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.

Program

Opening from hosts Rachael Rakes & Christine Larusso

Reading from Dorothea Lasky

Reading from Hafizah Geter

Reading from Marisa Crawford

Somewhere Only We Know by Jesse McLean

5 min, 2009

Standing on the brink of elimination, the suspense threatening to fracture their composure, contestants wait and see if they will be going home. The audience at home is also waiting…

Possibly in Michigan by Cecelia Condit

12 min, 1987

Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit’s other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.

Bios

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian/U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Ohio and South Carolina. She is a Hawthornden fellow in fiction, a Civitella Ranieri nonfiction fellow,  a Bread Loaf Katherine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, and a Cave Canem poetry fellow. Her memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House), won a PEN Open Book Award, and a  Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, and was a New Yorker Magazine Best Book, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon’s Best of the Month Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. ​She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan), nominated for a NAACP Image Award, finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. She is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit where she represents a diverse range of fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.​

Dorothea Lasky is the author of several poetry books, most recently, MOTHER (Wave Books, 2026) and The Shining (Wave Books, 2023). Her other poetry books include: Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series and MEMORY (Semiotext(e), 2025), as well as a future book about Sappho. She is the editor of Essays (Essay Press, 2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013). Her first novel, Katie, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review, among other places. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program. She lives in New York City.

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections Diary, Reversible, and The Haunted House. She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection, and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club. She lives in New York.

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 Bomb Magazine, Volume, the Colorado Review, Wildness, the Los Angeles Times, the Literary Review, Pleiades, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace, and was a co-founder of the Commonplace School. She lives in Los Angeles most of the time.

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.