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At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge?
Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the "golden spike": a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata-a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth's biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology?
Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility-of violence and/or of budding community.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the "golden spike": a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata-a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth's biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology?
Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility-of violence and/or of budding community.
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Reviews
"Here is a completely unique, genre-defying, anti-apocalypse story. It is sprawling in scope, pushing the limits of language and narrative to imagine futures beyond our wildest dreams. Iijima is both a poet and a theorist of our frightening yet fascinating contemporary condition-and she does justice to our capacity to change and discover new ways of being in the world."
Elvia Wilk
"Stories of a devastated multiverse, told across scales and spaces. Presence is a speculative novel soaked in ecological theory and full of the 'amphibious dayglow mushrooming creatureliness' that makes it fizz."
Daisy Hildyard
"A brainy and marvelous meditation on time and trauma, Presence tells the story of an alien invasion in which the others in our midst are not from another planet but from another time. Just as these beings are caught between temporal zones, Brenda Iijima's vibrant novel also lives within multiple crossings and layers, emerging from the interstices of ecopoetics, performance art, philosophy, geolog
Megan Milks
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- SeriesGeorgia Review Books