Unnatural Bird Migrator Launch & Reading: Ariel Resnikoff, Tyrone Williams, erica kaufman
Channel: The Operating System & Liminal Lab
Date: 10/09/2021

[Originally recorded on December 20, 2020; event hosted on Zoom.]

The Operating System & Liminal Lab celebrate the release of Ariel Resnikoff's UNNATURAL BIRD MIGRATOR at this launch event & reading, with special guests Tyrone Williams and erica kaufman! Hosted by OS/ LL founder & creative director, Elæ Moss.

In early praise of this powerful translingual work, Will Alexander writes: "Ariel Resnikoff's Unnatural Bird Migrator ignites immediacy. It casts spells. Indeed one's cells feel subsumed by primordial realia having nothing in common with the plagiarized density that purports to signify experience reduced as it is to secular equation by lucre. Resnikoff's UNBM roams via the telepathy of "wonder." As readers we begin to gather experience that articulates a plane suffused by magnificence, by the voice of the uncanny. This being language that allows us to crystallize fever, to excavate hunches via the mathematics of power."

Maria Damon writes: "It is commanded that you read the incantoxications inscribed herein: chants against the toxic forces of history, chants inducing euphoria akin to intoxication, that oracular pharmakon that embodies and staves off catastrophe, chants to induce laughterwisdominsight –ugh! No! chants to induce uneasedisequilibriuminnermigration … How many things can a (Jewish) mouth do? How many languages can one (Jewish) sensorium accommodate? How many tongues –one for each sense, one for each function –can worship one single God in one single mouth? Why single? Why not heteroglottal? Why not intermulticrosslingual? Who wants to know? You should. This book, this mouth, this wit, these migratory languages. Incandescent. Raving. And lit. in all the right ways."

Now available from the OS in both print and downloadable pdf from our Open Access Library, UNNATURAL BIRD MIGRATOR stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse, a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. UNBM traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile, looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the “other side” of the linguistic threshold already changed. This translinguistic praxis explores writing as a mode of perpetual displacement, translating language in wide spirals outward to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide, while gleaning materials for a poetics from even the minutest residues left behind. Resnikoff’s compositional method engages by (mis)translation in/to​ Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Aramaic- and Akkadian- adapted​ sonic/semantic properties in​ grammar, syntax and lexicon, taking English as its temporary “host” while performing perpetual inflectional slippages—interlingual punning and fusion-slangs—as much as the “host” can absorb. The dybbuk (Yiddish: spirit-possessor), which the author’s Jewish-Ashkenazi ancestors believed to inhabit the body of the wild stutterer, mad person, heretic or “akher” [lit. other], becomes the peripheral focus​ of this poetry, as Resnikoff reimagines the ways in which such a “possession” by language itself might manifest in the ​“odd” practices of the poet, translator and Jew. The word “odd” here functions in deliberate echo of the terms against which Sabbatean stigma was first transcribed in 17th-century Palestine: “for the odd practices of a false messiah.”

Pick up UNNATURAL BIRD MIGRATOR today at the OS & Liminal Lab's Bookshop Site: https://bookshop.org/books/unnatural-bird-migrator/9781946031877?aid=4259&listref=os-class-of-2020