Book Launch for Tgirl.jpg by Sol Cabrini w/ Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Roof Books
PS Ph.D. Candidate Sol Cabrini’s Tgirl.jpg has been published, and we’re ready to celebrate! Poet and writer Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Roof Books/Segue Foundation’s Lonely Christopher will kick off the program. After reading aloud from the book, Cabrini will take us on a musical journey through the issues it explores. Attendees will then have the opportunity for a Q/A session and a reception to follow.
Tgirl.jpg is a complex verse collection following a Black transgender woman’s life over a decade, from teenage years to adulthood, from Chicago to New York, with hefty philosophical and existential quandaries expressed in the same dynamic, catchy, heartfelt, and challenging voice found in her music. Cabrini’s hip-hop background is fundamentally intertwined through her poetics, with poems transforming into songs and back again, aided by a series of QR codes that make the reader a listener and invite them into a tapestry of interactive word and sound.
This dynamic assortment of poetry, diaries, letters, and songs will take you on a strange journey from innocence to experience, exploring the intricate relationship between self-discovery, social involvement with the world, and personal development —from the perspective of a trans Woman of Color. Cabrini tells a contemporary story of resilience and struggle, reckoning with lineages while forging ahead into an avant garde realm of Afro-Surrealism and racial intersectionality. Tgirl.jpg is as powerful as it is fun. Discover a new favorite experimentalist in the fascinating Sol Cabrini.
Bios:
Sol Cabrini composes music under the alias Sol Patches. She was part of Free Street Theatre’s ensemble, the artist/activist #LetUsBreathe Collective and has made several experimental films. A PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School, she is an alumni of the EMERGENYC program at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum.
Kamelya Omayma Youssef is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy’s Subway, 2022). Her work has been published with 1080 Press, Mizna, Sukoon, The Margins, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere as well as the theater stage. Her homes are Dearborn, Baalbek, South Lebanon, and Brooklyn, and she currently adjuncts at The New School. She and you will see a free Palestine in this lifetime.
Roof Books, an imprint of the non-profit Segue Foundation, publishes experimental, innovative, and avant garde poetry and criticism since 1976. Roof Books was founded by James Sherry. Roof Books currently publishes six titles annually. The groups that Roof Books has focused on include the New York School, Language poetry, Flarf, Conceptual writing, New Narrative, and environmental and ecopoetry, as well as related tendencies. Roof Books are edited by James Sherry, with occasional guests and Lonely Christopher joining the editorial staff in 2022.
The Segue Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) arts organization, created and operated by poet James Sherry, supporting the contemporary avant-garde since 1976. Segue was an instrumental platform for the Language poetry movement, in the late 1970s and early 80s, publishing the influential poetry periodical Roof and distributing the critical newsletter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
What people are saying:
Tilling the lyrical, Tgirl.jpg sings. Sol Cabrini uses dexterous language for her modular, mischievous positions. Unafraid to play, she burrows into the charmingly critical, (w)raps us up in it, post-consciously. She’s gaining up on the lossy, bearing soul. Tgirl.jpg is an abstraction shaped by its attention to detail, a debut to bop to. — S*an D. Henry-Smith
Cabrini’s Midwest existentialism does not relent in the tender love and affection with which it holds you. Poets actualize through exposing the wretchedness of the world. Peering in, we find ourselves. Cabrini reminds us that the authorial gaze doesn't have to dissect but can be a kiss impressed upon a scar; a note from our future self to recall that .jpg we downloaded some time ago, referencing how we might be. Cabrini offers a guide to curating our edits to the world, instigating a worlding in us. A future, not of completion but location. A world surging up in one's self, over generations. This text calls for our ever transitioning formation, playfully resounding in the dark.— Victor Peterson II
With my ears wide open to her music, I read Sol Cabrini’s Tgirl.jpg and am taken home, sitting as many of the poems do with Chicago and the Midwest at large. Reading this recently returned here, I am surprised to find that I am too unreturned and “turning toward the iteration of anew.” The poems in Sol’s magnificent debut collection put me into the “feeling of matter” and ask me what we do with matter’s changes. I am so glad for this .jpg from Sol not as a record of what may have been, but what was in process of becoming. — Imani Elizabeth Jackson