For Park Nights 2024, Serpentine presented Temporal Magic, an evening of poetry that brought together the voices of distinct literary scholars Anne Boyer, Don Mee Choi, and Denise Riley.
Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist whose work explores embodiment, truth, beauty, ephemerality, and history. Her books include The Undying, Garments Against Women, and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and have been translated into over a dozen languages. Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, the Windham-Campbell prize in nonfiction, the inaugural Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a Whiting Award in both poetry and non-fiction. She lives in Edinburgh and teaches poetry and poetics at the University of St. Andrews.
Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016). She has received fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her most recent translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection, Phantom Pain Wings (New Directions, 2023), received the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is currently based in Berlin.
Denise Riley is an author based in London. Her prose books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012). Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017) and Lurex (2022).
The evening culminated in a presentation of Roy Claire Potter’s debut novel The Wastes, published by Book Works in 2024.
Roy Claire Potter works between performance and experimental art writing and often collaborates with musicians for stage and broadcast. Recent works include To Call Out Into The Night, a studio album with Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha produced for BBC Radio 3, released by OTOROKU records (2022); Shit Out Here Purple, a libretto for amateur radio at Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (2023); and Land Lay Moldbrest, an audiobook guided by medieval pack horse trails of the South Pennines made with PRIMARY, Nottingham (2022). Marking Roy Claire Potter’s first novel, The Wastes is published by Book Works.
