We recently hosted and attended the launch of "The Flesh is Poet" by Lily Pearl Veinia, gathering in celebration of a debut collection.

"The Flesh is Poet" is a posthuman ode to the natural world and to the female body, a body that melted, decayed, and dissolved into the landscapes it inhabited. Across freeform poetry and tightly woven rhyming verse, Veinia chronicled the ways we contort and wound ourselves to please others, while ultimately choosing to cultivate an intimate love and nourishment for the physical self. In her writing, care for the body became inseparable from care for the physical world. In her debut work, she examined bodies that rusted and faltered, probing the pain and pleasure of searching for connection in a world we struggled to relate to, yet remained inescapably part of. The poems lingered between flesh and mechanism, asking what it means to remain soft, porous, and feeling in a culture that so often demands hardness.

As part of the evening, we shared an original piece by Divya Kishore, titled "Pain", which extended the conversation through its own meditation on embodiment. The piece remains available to read on our Substack.

We were grateful to hold space for work that so unflinchingly engaged with vulnerability and the politics of the body. It reaffirmed the importance of creating time to express ourselves. Not simply to listen, but to collectively sit with discomfort, beauty, and the complicated textures of being human.

Image credit: @gray.goes.black (Instagram)