Brenda Iijima

A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in is an ecological picaresque that reworlds possible senses of interrelation and personhood. In a spacious unending-unfolding, various narrators impact one another in a process of metamorphosis. In ecologically-sensitive language, perpetually in motion, sequences of occurrence crest and flow and pool in awareness. The protagonists persist in a looking glass biome of reality. Written collaboratively in a veritable hypnotic state by Janice Lee and Brenda Iijima, consciousness merges symbiotically and telepathically. Intent on stripping away the veneer of the "human" the work presses on toward mutuality with all floral, faunal, mineral, and viral presences to gain new insights into terrestrial cohabitation. Lee and Iijima probe the supposed limits and boundaries of bodies and in doing so, discover mutual affinity, cohabitation, and resonance. Intensely responsive, the work sclings and converses with everyone and everything it encounters."This book reminds me that it is still possible to be astonished, like a book actually happened to me, language unearthed, heart brought back to life, storytelling as incantation, unbound cosmic song."--Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust"A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in is a collection of vignettes of disintegration, mergers, and potentialities, a sensuous loosening of the human corporeal and psychic unit. Read Brenda Iijima and Janice Lee's collaboration for the surge of energy that runs through this book's open pores. Enter a dizzying journey of an injured bike rider in an injured world finding new potentialities as a squirrel mistakes her for a tree, as she becomes squirrel, becomes tree, becomes parched by fire and cooled by river. "Trees are an interface," "the soil is a membrane" and the "I" fractures like a seed that needs the fire's heat to sprout. Walking humans, friends, strangers, a ritual for a dead small dog who might become a companion spirit: the stories reach toward connection in human-shaped and more-than-human shaped ways, allowing the feeling human "I" to oscillate rather than vanish. Even the chance procedures of time and space conspire toward relation--"A list of the dog hairs that I didn't see but saved in my pocket." In this viral interspecies penetration, there's always searching: "Refugee status of microbes, pathogens--everyone looking for a home.""--Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma"Matter is promiscuous in Iijima and Lee"s A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, leaking from one body to the next, creating an embodied syntax that communicates a meaning much wider, much greener and weirder than the one humans generally practice. One wants to lick this text. To digest and excrete it. This book is good soil."--Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand and The Madonna SecretFiction. Nature.

At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge? Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the “golden spike”: a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata—a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth’s biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology? Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility—of violence and/or of budding community.

At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge? Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the “golden spike”: a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata—a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth’s biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology? Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility—of violence and/or of budding community.

Bionic Communality demonstrates floral, faunal and mineral consciousness as a cacophonous intensity of collaboratively acting through living histories and emergent meaning. Through textual interconnection, i>Bionic Communality engages language as both relational and positional. Taking cues from motile and audiovisual sensation in Iijima's hometown, submerged social facts are laid bare: femicide, ecocide, genocide. i>Bionic Communality works the intimacies of civic participation. Liberational struggles find power in coalition. Dying is addressed as well as living. i>Bionic Communality is a vibrant catalyst for personal, social and habitat transformation.

Remembering Animals chronicles the animal in all the complexity of such a categorization, revealing the ways in which bodies are marked and evaluated, used as resource, violated and occluded from history. It is a botched text—it is problematic and scarred. It hurts and registers the hurt. There is no comfort zone. These poems contort out of the marked position of human to bring an intimate awareness of our interrelational vibrancy.