This event was streamed online as part of the Politics & Prose Live! Series.
This program is part of DUBLIN VOICES, a collaboration between Politics and Prose Bookstore, the Embassy of Ireland, Solas Nua, and Global Irish Studies.
We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson's life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted. But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys--falling in love, becoming a mother--she turns her gaze outward. She delves into history, art, literature, and music, plotting the intimate experience of life in a women's body across a wide-ranging map. From Nick Cave to Taylor Swift, Botticelli to Frida Kahlo, Louisa May Alcott to Lucy Grealy, Constellations is an investigation into the different ways of seeing, both uniquely personal and universal in its resonances.
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Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE caught the imagination of readers and viewers with its evocative depiction of the student life at Trinity College, but beyond the cozy sitting rooms and student parties is a complex evolving city. DUBLIN VOICES highlights the diverse narratives that spring from the Irish capital. Our summer series features: Colum McCann, a Dubliner with a truly global outlook whose fierce new novel APIEROGON depicts love and loss in the Middle East; the US launch of LOVE, the latest acclaimed novel by Roddy Doyle, poet biographer of Dublin city & its suburbs; and the intensely personal, corporeal essays of Sinead Gleeson's CONSTELLATIONS which delve into what it is to be a modern Irish woman, reflecting Dublin not as a single city, but as multiple, sometimes conflicting communities. DUBLIN VOICES presents a case study of one of the world’s most celebrated literary centers: rooted in history and story, propelled into an inevitable modernity and now forced to confront the entangled realities of a post-pandemic urban space.
