Jenny Xie
Stranger Things: Language Against Assimilation
Online workshop | 19 March 2026 | 18.00-20.00 (GMT) 13.00-15.00 (EST)
Poems hold vitalizing power through estranging language, rendering us strange in our speaking. The late C.D. Wright, who infused her lines with her own “idiom Ozarkia,” believed “poetry should repulse assimilation.” “Each poet’s task is to fight their own language’s
assimilation,” she wrote. In this workshop, we’ll repulse assimilation in our poems by experimenting with strategies to galvanize and defamiliarize the way we speak and write. Together, we’ll read, listen to, and think and feel our way around poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Celan, and Sahar Muradi, and engage in exercises meant to de-domesticate and de-discipline our language and upend the usual assumptions about what it can, and should, do.
The workshop will include generative and revision-oriented exercises; participants should come with a poem or two that they would like to revise.
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense, finalists for the National Book Award. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. She is on faculty at Bard College, and lives in New York City.
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Please select the ticket type based on your current financial situation. We have two fully subsidised tickets available for this workshop, please only select this if you're not in a financial position to pay for a standard or solidarity ticket.
This workshop will be on zoom and details will be shared in advance.
For any questions contact hello@anamotpress.com