Orchid Tierney : part one

Orchid Tierney is from Aotearoa-New Zealand, currently residing in Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF, 2017), and a full-length sound translation of the Book of Margery Kempe, Earsay (TrollThread, 2016). She co-edits Supplement, an annual anthology on Philadelphia writing. Her collection, a year of misreading the wildcats, is forthcoming from The Operating System.

Photo credit: José Alberto De Hoyos

1. What are you working on?

I’ve recently completed my first manuscript, a year of misreading the wildcats (forthcoming from the fabulous Operating System), which is predominately preoccupied with the question of climate change, island disappearance, and oceanic pollution. The plasticity of oceanic violence however isn’t really a question that can be or should be settled easily, so my subsequent work continues to explore these intersections of, and the rifts between, poetic and physical ecologies. I’m currently working on two projects: a collage series, inspired by Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ recent publications, that interrogates Ozone depletion in the Southern Hemisphere, news of which was always in the background when I was growing up in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The second project is a poet’s anti-sentimental novel, blue doors.  I began this particular project ten years ago but I have only recently come to the realisation that I was critiquing the meat industry and neoliberal white veganism. I’m not sure what the endpoint for this last project is, since it has changed considerably over the last ten years, but my poetics is a slow percolation.