CAConrad is an American poet whose work joins ritual, ecology, queer and trans experience, grief, attention, the body, and radical experiments in poetic process. Since the early 2000s, their (Soma)tic poetry rituals have developed into a distinctive method for making poems through deliberate encounters with the physical world, memory, desire, animals, objects, public space, and altered states of attention.
(Soma)tic poetry rituals
CAConrad’s (Soma)tic practice treats the conditions surrounding a poem as part of its composition. A ritual may involve walking, listening, touching objects, changing routines, attending closely to a place, or creating a temporary set of bodily instructions. The resulting poem carries traces of that encounter in its imagery, syntax, rhythm, and structure.
The Book of Frank
The Book of Frank, published by Wave Books, follows the recurring figure Frank through surreal, comic, disturbing, and tender situations. The book uses repetition and episodic structure to build a strange social world around gender, family, authority, desire, violence, and transformation.
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics brings ritual instructions and poems into the same volume. The book makes CAConrad’s compositional method visible, showing how acts of attention can generate a poem and how poetry can reorganize a writer’s relation to everyday experience.
ECODEVIANCE
ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, published by Wave Books in 2014, extends the ritual practice into ecological and political space. The collection responds to damaged landscapes, consumption, public violence, animals, plants, and the pressures of contemporary life through twenty-three new rituals and their resulting poems.
While Standing in Line for Death
While Standing in Line for Death, published in 2017, emerged from rituals shaped by grief after the murder of CAConrad’s partner Earth. Mourning, rage, love, memory, violence, and survival move through poems that use ritual as a way to remain intensely present to loss.
AMANDA PARADISE
AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, published by Wave Books in 2021, turns toward extinction, time, damaged ecosystems, and forms of communion across species and eras. The book’s poems move rapidly between intimate perception and large temporal scales, allowing vanished creatures, present bodies, and imagined futures to share the same field.
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, published by Wave Books in 2024, focuses on animals living through the Anthropocene. The poems emerged from rituals of attention and care, and their visual shapes make the page itself part of the encounter. Wave Books has also announced CAConrad’s forthcoming collection First Light for 2027.
Ritual, attention, and poetic form
Across CAConrad’s books, ritual creates a practical structure for attention. The method can alter the scale of perception, bringing a small physical sensation beside ecological crisis, private grief beside public history, or an ordinary object beside visionary experience. Form grows from these crossings through spacing, repetition, visual arrangement, abrupt association, and intensified sensory detail.
Where to read CAConrad
The Poetry Foundation presents a substantial biography and selections of CAConrad’s work. The Academy of American Poets documents their books and (Soma)tic practice, while Wave Books presents current and forthcoming publications. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and poetic forms.