Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

The Anthropocenic condition gives us “a sense of the proximity we have to things we might otherwise have thought very distant from us.” David Farrier, author of Anthropocene Poetics, discusses deep time, extinction, and intimacy, asking how poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time. David is professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh, and he is joined here in conversation by Adam Dickinson, who is the author of four books of poetry including Anatomic. Adam is a professor in the English department at Brock University in Ontario. This edited conversation was recorded in July 2020. 

For more information, please visit z.umn.edu/poetics.

Topics discussed include diffraction-based poetics; Donna Haraway's reminder that we are kin-making beings; the concept of the Clinamen; Evelyn Reilly; Elizabeth Bishop; Seamus Heaney; Deborah Bird Rose; Karen Barad; Alfred Jarry. Additionally, David and Adam recommend poets whose work addresses the Anthropocene:
Brenda Hillman
Angela Rawlings
Harryette Mullen
Juliana Spahr
Jen Bervin
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Liz Howard
Dea Antonsen and Ida Bencke
Morten Søndergaard
Karin Bolender
Amanda Ackerman
Craig Santos Perez
Sean Hewitt

Anthropocene Poetics: David Farrier with Adam Dickinson

University of Minnesota Press

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