Book launch: Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous by Mark Anthony Cayanan
To celebrate Mark Anthony Cayanan’s new poetry collection Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, the author will be joined in a free online conversation about their book with poet Eunice Andrada. The event will include readings from the book.
Wednesday 9 June, 7 p.m. (AEST)
Online | Free, RSVP essential | Register on Crowdcast
About the book
Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is a work of wild erudition and rococo elaboration, a collection of poems that loosely channels the dynamic of desire and inhibition in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. The poems follow the trajectory of the ageing Aschenbach’s pursuit of youth and beauty, transmuting his yearning and resistance into jittery flirtations with longing, decay and abandonment against a backdrop of political violence. The poems have an exuberant candour, formed by polyphonic allusions which enact the intersectionality of the speaker, by turns melodramatic and satirical. Like the tragic protagonist of Death in Venice, Cayanan’s collection manifests a longing for extroversion sabotaged by its own will. It is a queer performance of anxiety and abeyance, in which the poems’ speakers obsessively rehearse who they are, and what they may be if finally spoken to.
About Mark Anthony Cayanan
Mark Anthony Cayanan is a poet from Angeles City, Philippines. They obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and are a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. Among their previous publications are the poetry books Narcissus and Except you enthrall me. They teach literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.
About Eunice Andrada
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet and educator. She is the author of Flood Damages (Giramondo Publishing 2018), which won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Born and raised in the Philippines, she now lives and writes on unceded Gadigal Land. TAKE CARE, her second collection of poetry, will be published by Giramondo in September.
