Zero Point Dream Poems :: Kendra Sullivan

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EXCERPT:

My friend, water. 
Water, from the friendly tap.
Water, my friend, our friendship 
is codified as commodity 
by economists. Our friendship  
is called a human right 
by the United Nations.
A common resource 
in the UK. A public good 
in the US. A utility in NYC— 
our friendship 
is unfiltered. It’s alive 
with shrimp-like larval
copepods. It isn’t Kosher, not exactly. 
My friend, my life is dependent 
on your friendliness 
toward me. My friend
your life is dependent 
on my species remembering 
to treat its friends better 
than a liquid asset 
or a universal solvent. 

THE BOOK

“This long song of the wandering mind in sleep offers a new but ancient view into the unconscious.
Interesting how it took a chorus to locate it.”

-Fanny Howe

“What’s the difference between the images conjured by my body/mind while reading and those conjured by my body/mind while dreaming? What’s the bridge between the two? What’s the difference between remembering a book and being changed by a book I can’t remember reading? Zero Point Dream Poems lends form to fevered dreams--resurrected from forgetfulness--about books--read during the pandemic--by feminist dreamworkers Nawal El Saadawi, Octavia E. Butler, Leslie Feinberg, Fanny Howe, Gayl Jones, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Their books opened into a series of dreams into this book of serial poems, a circular work that begins and ends elsewhere, beyond itself." 

-Kendra Sullivan

 

PRAISE FOR ZERO POINT DREAM POEMS:

“These poems…carry me off, completely, but not in the sense that they produce a seamless narrative that coheres so tidily I forget that it was made. They make no case for inevitability the way more normative, naturalized storytelling does. They do not arc like that. Instead, these poems splinter, into fractals but less organized, waves that interrupt each other heard later in a seashell phone in a dream. They have so many voices to sing across so many channels.”

—Laura Henriksen, from the introduction to Zero Point Dream Poems

 

THE AUTHOR

Kendra Sullivan is a poet, artist, and scholar-activist. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and co-leads the NYC Climate Justice Hub with partners at New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Kendra has produced public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on the interplay of public art, education, and civic action widely. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, a collective of artists, activists, scientists, and boatbuilders. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Zero Point Dream Poems is her first chapbook. Reps is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2024.

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