the Doughnut World

Did you know scientists confirmed a toroid planet could exist in our universe? Imagine: a world shaped like a donut, gravity desperately gripping its inhabitants with severe weather, shorter days, and weighty gravity to compensate for the drag of The Hole. This world, this Doughnut World, poses unique opportunities and challenges for its inhabitants. These inhabitants include Hucklebaby, i, Pierrot, the tree, CRAVAT, and Popeye Squirm, all beings who to ritualistically take over the life of The Artist/The Director/The Poet.

A hybrid poetry-play, the Doughnut World translates and transcribes a series of intentional rituals illuminating these once-unknown voices in hopes of queer revelations, decadence, camp, sweets, and orgies. The resulting collection bends itself towards performativity and leaps off the page in order to bring their world to ours on their terms. Besides taking cues from CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry, this collection remains inspired by the creative work of Lara Glenum, Shelley Feller, Kim Hyesoon, T. Fleischmann, David Bowie, Eileen Myles, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Hacker, and Val Kilmer.

The Doughnut World nurtures, among other things, tattoo culture, The Cockettes, baking, haute couture, 1970s glam rock, the Club Kids, and general self-indulgence in the process of curating queer decadence. Carefully cultivating these queer Americana clichés while balancing the distinct voices of the various beings worked together to craft a dynamic view of this toroid planet; kitschy poetics create a world resisting the active physical destruction ever-threatened by merely existing on a doughnut-shaped planet. By cavorting with queerness to the fullest extents possible, the planet’s inhabitants effectively “rage” against their destruction. In a world suggesting caution, light steps, and peripheral lodging in order to extend survival, the inhabitants of the Doughnut World AND the Doughnut World resist death and minimalism, embracing debauchery, erotic gluttony, and bodily hedonism while fully recognizing their ultimate fates on a tenuous planetary body.