Aldo Leopold Distinguished Lectures @ UNI

Fling Diction is a book about the vulnerability of desire; these poems explore different styles of relationships, including queer love, polyamory, familial drama, dog and human companionship, and longing in isolation. The characters find and lose each other in rural and urban settings; their experiences are intensified by the sensuality and ferocity of nature. This book is a record of the speaker' s blunders, embraces, and revelations as she seeks knowledge of the elusive other.

In 'Tropicalia', two writers, one Filipino and one American, set off on an unusual collaborative effort entailing the translation of one English to another English, allowing two different sensibilities to happen to the same language, the same content, and ultimately the same poem. Using Katigbak-Lacuesta's existing text, Cannon approached the concept of translation as a creative act, more than as a transcriptive one. She responded to the text in a series of poems, which were then re-translated into paintings. Mookie Katigabak-Lacuesta is the author of two poetry collections: 'The Proxy Eros' (2008) and 'Burning Houses' (2013). She obtained an MFA from the New School University in 2002, and has since taught in major universities in Manila, fronted a rock band, written feature articles, a libretto, and short fiction. She is the editor of Metro Serye, a fold-out zine featuring new poetry, fiction and graphic art in the Philippines. She also co-edited 'Fast Food Fiction Delivery: short short stories to go', an anthology of flash fiction, in 2014. Widely awarded, she was the Filipino delegate to the 2012 Medell n Poetry Festival. In 2015, she completed a writing residency for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Frances Cannon is a writer and artist currently pursuing a master's degree in nonfiction and book arts at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Iowa, and working as an editorial assistant to The Iowa Review. She was born in Utah and since then has bounced around living, making artwork, and writing, in Oregon, Maine, Montana, Vermont, California, France, Italy, and Guatemala. She received her bachelor's in poetry and printmaking at the University of Vermont, where she self-published several chapbooks of silkscreened prints and poems. She has also worked as an editorial intern and contributor at McSweeney's quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. She has recently been published in Vice, The Examined Life Journal, Edible magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

An illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's ideas; a graphic translation; an encyclopedia of fragments. Walter Benjamin was a man of letters, an art critic, an essayist, a translator, a philosopher, a collector, and an urban fl neur. In his writings, he ambles, samples, and explores. With Walter Benjamin Reimagined, Frances Cannon offers a visual and literary response to Benjamin's work. With detailed and dreamlike pen-and-ink drawings and hand-lettered text, Cannon gives readers an illuminated tour of Walter Benjamin's thoughts-a graphic translation, an encyclopedia of fragments. Cannon has not created a guide to Benjamin's greatest ideas-this is not an illustrated Walter Benjamin cheat sheet-but rather a beautifully rendered work of graphic literature. Cannon doesn't plod through thickets of minutiae; she strolls-a fl neuse herself-using Benjamin's words and her own drawings to construct a creative topography of Benjamin's writing. Phrases from "Unpacking My Library," for example, are accompanied by images of flying papers, stray books, stacked books-books "not yet touched by the mild boredom of order"-and a bearded mage. Cannon takes the reader through different periods of Benjamin's writing- "Artifacts of Youth," nostalgic musings on his childhood; "Fragments of a Critical Eye," early writings, political observations, and cultural criticism; "Athenaeum of Imagination," meditations on philosophy and psychology; "A Stroll through the Arcades," Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus; and "A Collection of Dreams and Stories," experimental and fantastical writings. With drawings and text, Cannon offers a phantasmagorical tribute to Benjamin's wandering eye.