LAUNCH PARTY for
Crocosmia
by Miranda Mellis
Published by Nightboat Books
Miranda Mellis discusses her new novel with Eleni Stecopoulos
A revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.
A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing—from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother’s disappearance—Mellis’s prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (2021); The Instead (2016); The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); The Revisionist (2007). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington.
Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic. Her most recent book is Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, published by Nightboat. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves”; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called “riveting . . . rare beauties.” Stecopoulos’s writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, [φρμκ], Best American Experimental Writing, Open Space (SFMOMA), In Insomnia: An Anthology, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, ecopoetics, Viz. Inter-Arts, Second Stutter, The Capilano Review, Harvard Review, and many other venues. She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor and mentor. She lives in Northern California.
Praise for CROCOSMIA
“A novel of revolutionary transition that achieves the impossible: not only charting the transformation of the mechanics of society, but the liberation of consciousness itself. Sentence by sentence, and in the impossible and enthralling architectures of each page, Miranda Mellis’s Crocosmia is a treasure.” -Jordy Rosenberg
“Miranda Mellis’ writing thus far spans genres and takes big formal risks that pay off.” -Tobias Caroll, Reactor
“If the choice facing us in the 21st century is between utopia and oblivion, we could do worse than turn for inspiration to radical speculative texts like Miranda Mellis’s world-altering Crocosmia. A novel that dares to imagine a future enlivened and entangled with art, reparation, and the vibrant presence of the more-than-human, Crocosmia is a ray of light pouring through a crack in our shattered world.” –Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“This is a book that feels committed to dreaming big, and this is the exact struggle that demands big dreams.” -Josh Cook
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation