Talk a Blue Streak: Lila Matsumoto, Vicky Sparrow, Jessica Higgins
London Launch for Lila Matsumoto’s third collection of poetry, Talk a Blue Streak published by Monitor. With readings from Lila, Vicky Sparrow, Jessica Higgins.
£5 suggested donation.
In 1990, a girl moves to the USA. She goes to school, learns English, becomes an American citizen, and aspires to become a writer. But what is she to make of the extravagance, bombast, and damage she encounters in the new country’s language and customs? And what about the shrink-wrapped hunks of frozen meat, hurricanes, and the cat-eye marbles scattered on the road?
Hugely pleasurable, in turns funny and dolorous, Talk a Blue Streak examines how the act of writing declares a selfhood, but one that is always performative, looped, and curlicued.
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Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), which was commended for the Forward Poetry Prize and recommended by the Poetry Book Society, Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018), and The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the band Food People and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham.
Vicky Sparrow works across poetry, sound and performance. Her work improvises with voice and objects to produce ambivalent textures between poetry and music that seek a re-sounded horizon. Vicky teaches in Nottingham and lives in South London.
Jessica Higgins is an artist and writer working primarily in performance, film, sound and text, she is interested in the voice and its entanglement in social infrastructures, as well as the form and question of performance. She has shown her work at, or as part of, Radiophrenia; Edinburgh Art Festival; Supernormal; Glasgow International Festival; David Dale Gallery; Castlefield Gallery; LUX Artist Moving Image Festival and Glasgow Film Festival. She also writes essays, fiction and poetry about other artists, music and films, and is one half of the band Guests.
