VEXATIONS: An Immersive Journey Through a Strange, Speculative World

Join the Flow Chart Foundation for VEXATIONS. A mother and daughter journey together through a strange speculative world—an immersive performance of Annelyse Gelman’s award-winning, book-length poem combining text, music, images, and field recordings.

Vexations (University of Chicago Press), winner of the 2022 James Laughlin Award, is a surreal, glitchy meditation on empathy, ecology, and precarity. Throughout the book winds a narrative about a mother and daughter as they move through a world of social and economic collapse in search of a post-capitalist safe haven. All the while, they also navigate a condition that affects the daughter’s empathic abilities, making her vulnerable to emotional contagion.

Vexations is titled and structured after Erik Satie’s composition of the same name, a piece that requires patience, endurance, and concentration. Similarly, Gelman’s Vexations employs repetition and variation to engage the reader’s attention. Hers is an ambient poetry, drawing on the aesthetic qualities of drone music and sampling voices and sounds to create a lush literary backdrop filled with pulsing psychedelic detail.

Experimental musician extraordinaire Zach Layton returns to the Flow Chart space to join poety/performer Annelyse Gelman for this immersive, multimedia performance.

Don’t miss it!

Annelyse Gelman’s most recent book, Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), won the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Gelman is also the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), and the experimental pop EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019), as well as the artist’s book POOL (Neck Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Gelman also founded and directs Midst, an app and digital publishing platform focused on capturing, saving, and sharing the writing process. Each poem published in Midst includes an interactive timeline showing readers exactly how each published poem was written and edited—blank page to final draft. Midst is in active development, with the ultimate goal of becoming a free and highly accessible public resource. The project has commissioned emerging and acclaimed contemporary poets, including Forrest Gander, Franny Choi, Daniel Borzutzky, Mónica de la Torre, Xandria Phillips, and Dan Beachy-Quick. Read Midst at midst.press/read.

Gelman’s language-based, trans-disciplinary projects are frequently ekphrastic and collaborative, using consumer-grade technologies and available materials to explore intimacy, vulnerability, and interdependence. Beyond publishing, her expanded poetics practice has resulted in a duet with Tavares Strachan’s neon sculpture at the Blanton Museum of Art, a reading with Deborah Butterfield’s sculptures at the Manetti Shrem Museum, and a performance for José Parlá’s Amistad America mural (Austin, TX), and many other projects. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Deutsch-Amerikanische Fulbright-Kommission, New Zealand Pacific Studio, Fondation Jan Michalski, Fondation Thalie, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers.

Zach Layton is is a guitarist, composer, curator, teacher and visual artist based in New York. He has composed orchestral music for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, MoMa/PS1, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, EMPAC, Eyebeam, International Computer Music Festival, Experimental Intermedia, Performa, Exit Art, Sculpture Center, Transmediale Berlin, SCOPE Art Foundation, Audio Art Festival Krakow and many other venues in New York and worldwide. He has worked with a diverse range of artists and musicians including Vito Acconci, Bradley Eros, Bobby Previte, Henry Fraser, Ben Vida, Tony Conrad, Victoria Keddie, Tristan Perich, Elliott Sharp, Joshua White, David Grubbs, Loren Connors, Luke Dubois, Peggy Ahwesh, Bradford Reed, Alex Waterman, and many more. Zach is also founder of the experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde” (co-curated with Nick Hallett), former co-curator of the MoMa/PS1 WarmUp music series and former curator of Issue Project Room.

Zach has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Turbulence.org, NYFA, Experimental Television Center, Danish Council for Visual Arts, Jerome Foundation, Signal Culture, Wave Farm and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant to artists award in the Music/Sound category. Zach is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College MFA program, and PhD at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. He has taught at NYU, the New School, Bard High School Early College, Bloomfield College, and is currently Assistant Professor of Music Production at Ramapo College of New Jersey.