Avenue 50 Studio
in conjunction with The Operating System
is excited to invite you to the book launch of

ATTENDANCE
by Rocío Carlos
and Rachel McLeod Kaminer

Friday, October 19, 2018
Doors 7:30 PM | Reading 8:00 PM

Featuring Rocío and Rachel
Along with with very special guests:

Sara Borjas
traci kato-kiriyama
Ashaki Jackson

////soul and motown from DJ Douglas Brown, in honor of Theandrew\\\\

At Avenue 50 Studio
131 N. Avenue 50
Highland Park 90042

Parking behind the building

Also accessible via Metro Gold Line. Closest stations are Southwest Museum station and Highland Park station.

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(A documentary work of attending to the year. The term was born from Rocío’s description of going outside every morning to check on every thing that grows in her backyard. Together we decided one of us would attend to the flora and one of us would attend to the fauna. Of course, we found it difficult to stay in our own lanes. The whole world crept in: Family, friends and community; politics, atrocity, tragedy; literally the world. The book is presented in the notes and poems of both poets, beginning with a month in the voice of Rachel alternating with the same month in the voice of Rocío.)

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**read excerpts on Cultural Weekly, here:
https://www.culturalweekly.com/tag/attendance/**

“‘Attendance’ is a meditation, an ushering-in of the kind of mindfulness that life deserves. One that leaves readers like me nodding and saying yes to lines like these: ‘Just try to want different things’ and ‘You can do anything you want with me as long as you do it slowly first.’ Carlos and Kaminer are power, and this book is plain gorgeous.”
Natashia Deón, author of ‘Grace’

“I expected to be moved by this collaborative work from Rachel McLeod Kaminer and Rocío Carlos—they are two distinct and beautiful poets after all. But what I didn’t expect from ‘Attendance’ is the way it brought the life around me to life. How the birds and the trees and the landscape began to move in ways I hadn’t noticed before, how my skin began to feel enveloped by the details of the day. Great art has always made me know that I belonged in the world, that I wasn’t wandering through it alone. And ‘Attendance,’ as much as any recent book, has reminded me of this truth.”
Chiwan Choi, author of ‘The Yellow House’

Reading ‘Attendance’ trains your attention on plants and animals until you can’t stop noticing them. It’s a way of moving through the natural world—which turns out to include the whole world. An almanac, a logbook, a devotional, a witness statement, poetry. A documentary not in the sense of capturing but in the sense of being a creature paying attention to the world we already live in. It’s a hybrid text: One year of two people reaching their arms across styles and genres. At times notes, at times lists, or run-on sentences, or poems, or things that want to be poems, but always plants, and always animals. The words are offered up with no correction or with the revision exposed. This is writing that includes where it comes from or writing that painfully doesn’t become.

We hold so many questions about love and attention and violence.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Rocío Carlos is the author of (the other house), forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2019. She is also the author of Coyolxhauqui, Los Angeles (Archetype Press, 2012), A World Below (Mindmade Books, 2014), and co-author of ex*her*pt (wirecutter collective, 2016). She was selected as a 2003 Pen Center “Emerging Voices” fellow. She has infamous cats.

Rachel McLeod Kaminer grew up in the Blue Ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. Her book of poetry As in the dark, descend was published with Writ Large Press in 2016. Rachel lives and works in Los Ángeles.