POST-BOOK: KIMBERLY ALIDIO

The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of a book’s release. This issue’s featured writers include Kimberly Alidio:

What is your most recent book?

after projects the resound (Black Radish Books, 2016)

When was it released?

Monday, August 29, 2016

What has been the response?

Bodies in the same room. Effie Street with Joshua Jennifer Espinoza; Malvern with Robyn Collado and kt shorb; Resistencia with Lilia Rosas; Bolm Studios Courtyard with Dalton Day, Felix Morgan, Chessy Normile, Ray Shea and Jesus Valles; Butterfly Bar with Fernando Flores, Megan Kaminski and John Pluecker; Mags with Eileen Tabios, Brittany Billmeyer-Finn and Jesse Nissim; Arts Estuary with Marthe Reed and Megan Kaminski; UC-Riverside with Fred Moten’s students, (playing) The Stooges and Hanni El-Khatib; and Red Emma’s with Jesse Nissim and Brenda Serpick (see below)

Always (before, during and after): email intimacies.

A dream of reading aloud with and to another person across a kitchen table.

What has surprised you about the response?

Finding the book in someone’s living room during brunch.

My colleague reading the school library’s copy at his desk, a few feet from mine. My squirming in his sightline adding to his reading enjoyment. I hate you, Charles.

Coming home to Baltimore (see below). Realness and dreaming. Visceral understanding and acceptance balancing out the rooms in which I felt again what it feels like to be a disturbance.

Tell me something about the book that may not be obvious or known.

I try to avoid saying the title aloud. The first two title words trade off on acting as the subject of the phrase. So it’s both AFter PROjects [pause] the reSOUND and AFter proJECTS the reSOUND. 

What are you working on now?

I'm writing a monster manuscript on dancers, infidelity, emotional numbness, nausea, and alien landscapes shifting and reconstituting the alien body. It seems to want to be an epic in Renee Gladman-like prose blocks. It asks: what book can be written now, after a year of anguish and possibility?

*****

Kimberly Alidio wrote After projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). She is the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Thought and a poetry fellow of Kundiman and VONA. She received fellowships from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and the University of Illinois’s Asian American Studies Program, as well as a doctorate in modern American history from the University of Michigan. A tenure-track dropout and high-school teacher, she hails from Baltimore and lives in East Austin, Texas.