“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

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

by Lisa Samuels

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Taking up perception, ecology, community, lingual value, and quantum life, Imagining What We Don’t Know: Creative Theory and Critical Bodies comprises twenty-four essays and theory poems that blend provocative neologisms – wild dialectics, distributed centrality, soft text, and more – with readings of visionary philosophers and UK, Caribbean, US, Australasian, and Oceania art and writing. 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 arts, transnational and transdisciplinary life, and how we imagine with language.

About the Author

Lisa Samuels experiments with writing, art, and relational theory. The author of fifteen books, from The Seven Voices (1998) to Livestream (2023), and many chapbooks, broadsides, and essays, she also edits literary work, collaborates with other artists, and performs internationally. Samuels is known for innovating: deformance, her doctoral method of literary interpretation, has become an established interpretive practice; Tomorrowland is a transmigration epic also made into soundscape CDs and an art film (2017, dir. Wes Tank); the omissive writing of Anti M trials a new autobiographical form; her novel Tender Girl (Mekana Devojka, trans. Milan Pupezin) re-envisions neosurrealism; and Breach is a pandemic meditation in para-helical strands. Samuels grew up in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, became an academic in the US, and now lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand.