Join Philadelphia's Poet Laureate Raquel Salas Rivera & friends Friday, March 15th at 7PM to celebrate the launch 🚀 of their new book "while they sleep (under the bed is another country)" from Birds, LLC at the Institute of Contemporary Art!

With readings & performances by:

Denice Frohman

Noor Ibn Najam

Ryan Eckes

Cynthia Dewi Oka

Frank Sherlock

Husnaa Hashim

Wes Matthews

Yolanda Wisher

Kirwyn Sutherland

Sham E-Ali Nayeem

and Raquel Salas Rivera

Free and open to all, with music 🎵 by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, aka Dj Halfbreed, drinks, and Raquel's new book for sale with a book signing by the author. Join us from 7pm to 10pm at Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania at 118 S. 36th Street.

For more info about "while they sleep", and to pre-order, visit: http://www.birdsllc.com/catalo...

(50% of sales will be donated directly to The Maria Fund, an organization dedicated to supporting emergency relief efforts as well as long-term organizing to build an equitable Puerto Rico.)

while they sleep (under the bed is another country) refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María’s aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and intersped with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child’s nightmare. Written in English, while they sleep points to a imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, under the bed is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.