Strange Architectures Book Launch with 12, a collective of women writers

About this event

07.10.26. 6.30–8pm. “I often dream of buildings.” Williams will read poems from the collection chosen by the 12, and poets from the 12 will read new poems they have written in response. Please join us for the multi-voiced and echoing launch of these dream poems into the world. Readers will include: Tessa Berring, Anne Laure Coxam, Lynn Davidson, Harry Josephine Giles, Jane Goldman, Marjorie Lotfi, Saskia McCracken, Jane McKie, Theresa Muñoz, Catherine Street, Alice Tarbuck, JL Williams and Karen McCarthy Woolf. About the collection: Since humans first put stone on stone to build a shelter, the creation of architecture has been a means to survival, a key to engendering family and community – and more, an expression of our aspirations and desires. What land we choose to build our homes on, what soil is good soil for calling home, how we care for our loved ones and our land… these are some of the earliest questions asked by humans, and ones we still consider and fight over today. JL Williams wrote the poems in this collection over the past five years. In the isolated, claustrophobic depths of the Covid pandemic and the initial year of life with her daughter, she woke almost nightly from intense dreams, each dream being the exploration of a building, environment or architectural site. The poems are records of these dreams, which continued for years, seemingly stemming from a need to explore when exploration was forbidden, a longing for bigger spaces, other places, other people, other lives and the forging of new identities. The poems expose dreams as time machines, portals that allow us to travel in every direction, inside ourselves and far beyond into the past and future, into the psyche and the heart. About JL Williams JL Williams is a contemporary poet and librettist whose work explores themes of myth, metaphysics, nature and the human experience through a lyrical and often superreal lens. Born in New Jersey, USA, and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Williams has a strong international presence, blending American and Scottish literary traditions with a distinctive voice that often challenges and expands the boundaries of poetry. Her poetry collections include Condition of Fire (2004), Locust and Marlin (2014), After Economy (2017), Origin (2022) and Strange Architectures (2026), which have garnered critical acclaim for their vivid imagery, emotional depth, and innovative use of form. www.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk. On Instagram @jlwpoetry About 12 12  is a collective of women writers using a shared Google document to post monthly poems in response to one another’s writing. The collective originally formed in 2016 at the request of Sophia Hao, curator at Cooper Gallery in Dundee, in order to create work echoing the collaborative Feministo Postal Art Event of 1975-77. For that project, women made art at home and posted it to one another, generating home-based art collections and a tight-knit community of women artists. The poets in the collective so enjoyed writing in a safe and easily accessible space, with a simple constraint and support garnered from working alongside and in response to one another’s creativity, that they decided to continue. One poet writes a lead poem each month and the others each post a response. https://12poetry.wordpress.com/ Quotes about the Collection This tour through Piranesian dreamworlds is also a tour through collective desire. With a subtle clarity, Jennifer Williams shows how our fears and longings manifest in architectural fantasies: the dream home, the model workplace, the palace of wonders. The buildings of these tense lyrics are at once familiar and disturbing, the way an influencer’s aspirational feed betrays what’s bloodthirsty about want. Where one poem comforts or pleases, another unsettles, and another confuses, because in this oneiric logic feelings flow with less reason and more truth. By pursuing her own obsessions with skilful and restrained poetic commitment, Williams has made a very personal map that anyone can, and should, follow in order to find themselves lost. Harry Josephine Giles Like Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, these oneiric architectures rise up revealing a glimmering imagination. The visually compelling constructions in these poems possess a beauty that can be subtly unsettling in its materials, proportions, or the relationships or emotions hidden within. At a time when our eyes are already jaded from the remixed possibilities of AI-generated imagery, this intriguing collection is balm for the inner eye, offering an expansive poetics of space as well as an invitation to take in a sharper and more intricate view of the details around us, and savour the questions about our ways of inhabiting. Juana Adcock Jennifer constructs cities and skylines of words, inviting us to live within their shelter and syllables. Her poem-architectures are exact ambiguities, precisely lit from every angle of language and geometry to pinpoint each space, each proportion. Iain Matheson