Petra Kuppers

Recent Books

Diver Beneath the Street (poetry collection, Wayne State University Press, February 2024)

True Crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil, at the membrane of life and death.

Reviews here.

If you’d like to be read to, here is a 9 minute excerpt, prepared for StokerCon 2024 (i.e. a horror writing convention).

Three essays about the practice behind the collection:

Tree Witnesses: True Crime Stories, essay in Michigan Quarterly Review, Mixtape: About Place (May 2024) “I am sure you have your own stories deeply hidden in your social habitus, your embodied memories. Here is a prompt for you, an invitation to take this essay’s inquiry into your own bodymindspirit. Think about how your walk on the land shifts when you read of assaults, map a psychogeography of misogynistic and (to use Moya Bailey’s term) misogynoir crimes. How do you step?”

Land/Writing Feminist Alchemies: True Crime Witnesses, essay in differences (December 2023)

With images from Mirtha Dermisache, Ana Mendieta, poems from my collection Diver Beneath the Street, glimpses from Maggie Nelson and from Cynthia Pelayo, moments of women dancing together: “The genre of true crime poetics hollows out a small space for memory and remembrance, and layers writing onto the site of narrative inquiry. Writers write, each in our own way, legible and illegible, for the material fact of these human-scaled temporal shifts in the progression toward dirt, humus, decay: she went before her time, cut down, murdered. Here are lines—on paper, in space, in my hand—to remember her by.”

Disabled Sonnets Go to the Café and Write about Death, tiny craft essay about deformed sonnets on Poetry Daily, to go along with the Split/Screen poem-of-the-day (November 2023)

Interviews about the practice behind Diver Beneath the Street:

Voyage Michigan:

“The Diver Beneath the Street collection emerged when I couldn’t work in my usual ways, i.e., being with people, creating performances together, and engaging in somatic work that allows us to explore pain and joy in new ways in our body, mind, and spirits. For much of 2020 and some of 2021, we all were in lockdown: thrown back into our own homes, often small apartments, segregated and afraid of one another and of what the outside world would bring to us. … (so we invented Turtle Disco and)

“Turtle Disco is now both in-person (for small movement and writing events, masks very welcome), and online (for instance, for weekly Starship Somatics sessions online through Movement Research: going on meditative movement experiences together, diving into the soil or soaring to other planets). Many of these online experiences — using our imagination to walk, move, and fly — are part of the Diver Beneath the Street collection.”

National Endowment for the Arts:

“Disability culture methods means, for me, that I’m always trying to come from the place of a question. Who’s not in the room, and how can we have more people in the [real or virtual] room? That core question characterizes to me what disability culture is about. I, and the group of people I work with, always think about whoever “we” are as provisional. The kind of ways in which we communicate are provisional. We’re not trying to come up with best practices. Instead, we’re trying to experiment toward more access for more of us, toward more open futures. For me, that meant that my first art practices beyond these student experiments were Dance with a Difference, where I’ve danced with people who also had significant chronic pain. I danced a lot with people in hospice, in the last months of their lives – hand dances, skin dances, small vibrational work of presence and joy. “

Gut Botany (Poetry Collection, Wayne State University Press, 2020)

Winner: Creative Book Award, ASLE/Association of the Society for Literature and the Environment 2022. Award Citation: “In Petra Kuppers’s Gut Botany, body and language bloom open to bear witness to ecological, linguistic, and human wounds, grief, and healing. We are in the body in these poems, feeling the ache in a hip alongside the slippery pleasure of love—and, importantly, Gut Botany works with a body far too often silenced in environmental and contemporary literature. Kuppers shows her speaker’s existence as a “gender-non-conforming nebula,” as a person with a wheelchair, and as a survivor of assault, together with richly textured and evocative accounts of Michigan waterways and the sturgeon. Through surrealism and situationist poetry, Kuppers resists heteropatriarchy, ableism, and settler-colonialism through deep interconnection with the sentient ecologies around her. Gut Botany shows the interconnection of human and more-than-human bodies through the porous flow of water and of language. “Silica water rushes pearl kernels onto the land,” she writes, “Make yourself this place, / bones open into embrace, / my face outward, into the wind’s curvature.” Here is a book that shows what it is to inhabit a particular body, with its legacies of trauma and privilege, and to work through language—itself also a medium of trauma and privilege—in ways that acknowledge and choose respectful existence.”

 

Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (Criticism/Autoethnographic Writing, University of Minnesota Press, open access, 2022)

Eco Soma Honors:

Winner, Outstanding Book, with Distinction for Innovative Achievement, ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education)

Honorable Mention: Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award, National Dance Educators’ Association (NDEO) 2023

Honorable Mention: Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Contribution to Theatre History, ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research), 2024.

Short list for the de la Torre Bueno© Prize (Dance Studies Association) 2023.

Short list for the British Theatre and Performance Book Award, the David Bradby monograph award (TaPRA) 2023. Panel citation: “The panel commends Petra Kuppers for Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters. We found this book to be methodologically daring, and a profound and effective experiment in an embodied encounter with performance by and with disabled practitioners. It will surely be a valuable text for the study of disability and performance, in particular for its demonstration of how an auto-ethnographic approach might be captured vividly in speculative, tentacular writing.”

Ice Bar (Speculative Short Stories, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2018) (Finalist, Eludia Award)

 

Recent Poems

Supply Chain Plaything, The Offing (2024)

Buttonbush, collaboration with Orchid Tierney, The Swannanoa Review (2024)

Prickly Pear Cactus, collaboration with Orchid Tierney, About Place (2024)

Bone Planet, Future Fire, with Interview (2024)

Fungi Moves, Tree Crawler, Tree Futures The Goose (2023)

Split/Screen Poetry Daily (originally published in the Texas Review) (2023)

‘Forest Starships’ Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets (2023)

‘Coventry Street, Detroit‘ Zócalo Public Square (2023)

Huron River Time About Place More-Than-Human-World Issue (2023)

‘Whispers, and the Queer, and the Stars‘ About Place Rivers Issue (2023)

‘Jupiter,’ Poetry online, (2022)

‘Found on a Pond Deck,’ Poetry online, (2022)

‘Craniosacral Rhythms’ Poetry online, (2022)

Zoom Somatics in Four Poems (mini essay and four poems). Edge Effects. (2021)

‘Book Lungs‘ Orion Magazine (2021) – Link to a live reading of the poem, Noon Poem, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan

 

Recent Video Poem:

Starship Somatics: An Invitation, co-created with Charli Brissey. POETRY, March 2024.

 

Recent Creative Non-Fiction

Starship Somatics: Disability Walking in Outer Space. The Hopkins Review (2023)

Disability and Sexual Assault in Public(s): Performance/Nebula. Biography. 45:4, 2022, pp. 499-513 (appeared November 2023)

Crip Ecologies: Changing Orientation. Poetry Magazine (2022)

EcoSomatics Archive. Jacket2 (2022)

Interview (by Kristy Cox): Writing While Disabled. Strange Horizons (2022)

About Turtle Disco: ‘Online Intimacies and Artful Life in Turtle Disco Zoomshells,’ in: Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, edited by xtine burrough and Judy Walgren, Routledge, 2022: 241-237.

(co-authored with Stephanie Heit) Hurricane Poetics and Crip Psychogeographies. Ecotone (2019)

 

Recent Fiction

13 Tides. Ecozon@ (2021)

Mercury Worms. Shoreline of Infinity 16 (2019), reprinted in HIVES zine, Michigan State University (2020)

Coral Tissue. Psychopomp (2020)

The Road Under the Bay. Future Fire. A Journal of Sociopolitical and Speculative Cyber-Fiction.

 

Recent Editing Work

SomaFlights issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, co-edited with Vidhu Aggarwal (2023), Whole print issue, plus Online Folio

 

Image Description: a diverse group of dancers, part of the Eco Monster Symposium 2021, with addenda from a workshop by Marc Arthur. Petra on the left, dancing with her pink lightsaber.

About Petra’s Performance/Dance Practice

About Petra

Gut Botany

Ice Bar: Queer/Crip Speculative Stories

Asylum Stories

EcoSomatics Symposia

Practices of Hope Reading Series

Events