Reading: Natalie Mariko + after party

Natalie Mariko is a transwoman poet from New Jersey, residing in Athens. Her début collection, HATE POEMS, was published by the Australian publishers, no more poetry, in 2023. She is managing editor of CODE Magazine, a junior contributing writer for CLOT Magazine, former poetry editor of SAND Journal and an artist in residence at Garage Gallery for 2024. She studied English & African Literature and Film at the University of Cape Town.

In HATE POEMS, her poetry gestures toward the repetitious, solitudinous centre of contemporary existence as the small and reprehensible ‘self’ begs to burst out from behind the veil of curated digital experience. Loneliness, paranoia, desperation and despair are the milieu in which the castigated subject – the lowercase and abject ‘i’ – toils and pleads, only to evade total sincerity. The poems are a frenetic exercise in (self-)mockery.

Her more recent work instigates a recusance of these earlier variations: what, in an era typified by digital transience, where artificially rendered hyper-realist landscapes seek to replace the escapism available to us in retreat, can a legacy of words relate? The result is a poetics of association. Footnotes, hyperlink, second language interference and archaisms combine to create a dizzying simulacrum of the epic or lyric overlaid onto the more schizoid intersubjectivity inherent to a life lived in ‘ambient awareness’. Her residency at Garage Gallery aims to elaborate upon this central problematic of (im)permanence.