Hi Zero Seventy-Three features readings and performances from Dolly Turing & Sally-Shakti Willow, Samuel James, and Rosy Carrick, upstairs at the Hope & Ruin on Tuesday 29th October.

Sally-Shakti Willow researches, writes and performs utopian poetics as ritual to open up [r]evolutionary space for positive transformation. Sally-Shakti’s poetic rituals include ‘radical doula’ a poem for the Rise Up & Repeal anthology (Sad Press 2019), which was written with the intention of performing a ritual/role/service as a ‘long-distance doula’ for the birthing of conscious and supported abortion practices in Ireland following the vote to Repeal the 8th Amendment in 2018. She sometimes teaches/has taught literature, poetry, creative writing and Wellbeing When Writing at the University of Westminster. Poetry publications to date: The Unfinished Dream (Sad Press, 2016) and Atha (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019). Forthcoming: [un].holy: 33 sonnets for Brigid and Writing Utopia, an anthology of utopian poetics co-edited with Sarer Scotthorne (both with Hesterglock Press, 2020).  

Dolly Turing works in poetry, sound, play, ritual, magic. They love collaborations, resonance, dissonance; finding new, open, transformative ways to tell stories, and remembering to tell the cosmic joke. One growing, evolving thing they are working on is Quest)ion), a poetry meets soundscape ritual about what it is to love places: real and imaginary, spirits, stories and nothingness. What responsibilities do our ancestors leave us with? What is belonging? What is ‘home’? The other, Play Stance, explores play as transmutation, metamorphosis and meaning cookery. The two overlap, both with a side of queerness, and invoking of high/hard spirits. Their first pamphlet OH (PARA)COSMIC BEING came out with The Vinter Olympiks in October 2016. They have had work published by Datableed and Litmus and music out on Contour Records. Their poem The Past’s Future in Ignota’s Spells anthology was described as a “bold anthem”  in The New Statesman (wtf).

Together, Sally-Shakti and Dolly have written and performed a series of collaborative anti-racist dub-ritual-poems for the Original Plus Dub anthology (Hesterglock Press, 2019) and Freedom of Movement – a ritual-poetry-protest-anti-Brexit-performance at the mid-point between Article 50 and the initial Brexit date, with Yael Karavan & Xelís de Torro. Their work at October’s Hi Zero is both a new beginning and continuation of this process.

Rosy’s first full poetry collection, Chokey, was published in 2018 by Burning Eye Books. For the last decade she has hosted the poetry stages at Latitude and Glastonbury festivals, and is also co-curator of the Port Eliot festival poetry stage. Rosy has a PhD on the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and has released two books of his work in translation: Volodya (Enitharmon, 2015) and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Smokestack, 2017). Last year, Rosy’s debut play Passionate Machine won the Best New Play award at Brighton Fringe and The Infallibles Award for Theatrical Excellence at Edinburgh Fringe. This year she has been alternately touring that show and working on Musclebound, a new project about the politics of the eroticised torture of male bodybuilders in 1980s Hollywood films. It’s going to be VERY SEXY.

Samuel James lives and teaches in the south of England. He writes stories that are sometimes like poems, lifted from a variety of sources