“Recording the event say, I am the event.”

The event represents the lyrical, but an attempt at defining the event endlessly defers meaning—poetry readings, death, belonging, the digital and— Post-Mortem of the Event is a cyclical archive that twists back to recorded readings of Klara du Plessis’s earlier Hell Light Flesh and leans forward to invoke a still unwritten manuscript. Here poetic composition encompasses audiovisual media, transcription, wave form visualization, and digital humanities and interdisciplinary methods. With the maturity of three previous collections, Du Plessis presents a brilliant expansion of her musical yet essayistic poetics.

Klara du Plessis is a poet, artist-scholar, and literary curator. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and her critical writing received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award. She is known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics, and writes in and between English and Afrikaans. Welcoming collaborative formations, her narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film with composer Jimmie LeBlanc, and premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art in 2023. Klara develops an ongoing series of experimental and dialogic literary events called Deep Curation, an approach which posits the poetry reading as artform. Post-Mortem of the Event is her fourth poetry collection.

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Klara du Plessis' Post-Mortem of the Event is a stunning record of a moment, of a sound, of a gathering of bodies and voices. A document of affect and replication, of the silk and mythology of waves and .WAVs. This is a book to be heard, to be listened to, as much as it is to be read

Jordan Abel, Griffin Poetry Prize-winner and author of Empty Spaces