Plenitude

A non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state’s boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto.

Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik’s experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?

Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.

AUTHOR

Daniel Sarah Karasik

A writer in Toronto, Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is a co-founder and coordinator of Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty, a network that seeks to connect artists with grassroots social movements for radical change. Their recent writing on prison abolition, trans liberation, antisemitism, and socialist aesthetics appears in Briarpatch Magazine. Their Dora Mavor Moore Award–nominated writing for the stage has been produced across Canada, in the US, and in translation in Germany. They are also the author of several books of drama, poetry, and fiction, most recently the short story collection Faithful and Other Stories (Guernica Editions). Honours include the CBC Short Story Prize and the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award.

Reviews

“Karasik’s commitment to both whimsy and philosophical searching holds the collection together.” —Defunkt Magazine

“In Plenitude, Karasik writes a lyric around gender, writing into a sense and a self, including the political mechanisms of required resistance to exist as a transgender person in the world, as well as the energies required, and the exhaustions that would surely follow.” —rob mclennan

“Daniel Sarah Karasik’s Plenitude is ‘trans-socialist’ as in (among other things) having ‘communism that would abolish debates over when and how to say ‘communism’’ as its horizon. At turns motivating, thought-provoking, touching and hilarious, this collection compresses volumes of theory and collective experience into shockingly short poems grounded in a world where ‘freedom / [is] a spilling over / from one bright, / unbearable / impossibility / into the next’ and there’s a ‘we’ struggling toward it. Karasik is the kind of writer that wants everything; this is the kind of book you read and give to comrades.” —Wendy Trevino, author of Cruel Fiction