Toward the end of this urgently searching book, in which art and life, literature and philosophy, imagination and realism are put into conversation, Lisa Samuels declares. “I want to emphasize our present cultural interactions as gift and attention rather than as acquisition and accumulation.” This emphasis, in essays such as “Withness,” “does not seek to be somewhere other than in relation.” Thought experiments in complex interrelations are enacted on almost every page, carrying through an implicit pledge to posit ‘a center at every point.’ A valiant necessity on this endangered sphere we sometimes (most accurately) call mother earth.

~ Joan Retallack, author of The Poethical Wager

Imagining What We Don't Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies

by Lisa Samuels

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Bringing together perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies presents twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend interpretive neologisms – wild dialectics, distributed centrality, membranism, deformance, bioautography, transplace, soft text, and more – with readings of visionary philosophers and the art and writing of Algeria, Australasia, the Caribbean, Oceania, the UK, and the US.

Committed to experimental ideation and relational ethics, Imagining What We Don’t Know is for art and theory practitioners, philosophy rebels, creative writers, and anyone who relishes thinking about contemporary art, transnational and transdisciplinary life, and how we imagine with language. Ultimately, Imagining What We Don’t Know is a kind of edifice, or biblioarchitecture, that has been built with theories of the embodied mind – elemental, entangled, and electrified by the political – that are positioned toward the kinds of art and interpretation that hold open our attentions, that encourage a hovering with relational alterity, with making room for imagining what we can’t know in advance.

About the Author

Lisa Samuels experiments with writing, art, and relational theory in transnational life. The author of fifteen books, from The Seven Voices (Litmus Press, 1998) to Livestream (Shearsman Books, 2023), and of many chapbooks and essays, Samuels also edits literary work, collaborates with other artists, and performs internationally. Samuels’s doctoral theory-practice, deformance, is an established interpretive method; the transmigration epic Tomorrowland (Shearsman Books, 2009) has been versioned as a soundscape audio and an art film (dir. Wes Tank); Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015; Mekana Devojka, trans. Milan Pupezin) re-envisions the neosurrealist novel; and The Guardian recognized Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman Books, 2015) in its annual top ten poetry books. Samuels grew up in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, became an academic in the US, and currently lives in Oceania.