Rain of Blows: the dignity of Lani Maestro's "her rain"

No Pain Like This Body, 2010. Photograph by Hua Jin. Courtesy and copyright of Lani Maestro.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Lani Maestro for conversation. Erín Moure for the poem “the unmemntioable” from The Unmentioable (Toronto: Anansi, 2012). Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (NY: Verso, 2009). Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Disparates sur la voracité”, MLN, Vol 106, No. 4, French Issue: Cultural Representations of Food (Sep., 1991, 765-779, Johns Hopkins). http://www.jstor.org/pss/2904623 accessed October 7, 2011.

About Lani Maestro

Lani Mestro was born in Manila, Philippines in 1957. She came to Canada in 1983 and pursued an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1989. In that period, Maestro was awarded a Bienal Prize for her works in the Segunda Bienal de la Habana in Cuba (1985). Since then, Maestro has received increasing international recognition and her work has been exhibited widely across the world. Maestro mounted two major exhibitions in Canada in 2010, l’oubli de l’air, in collaboration with American composer Malcolm Goldstein at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, and “her rain” at the Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. In 2011, an expanded version of “her rain” is re-configured for the space of Plug-In ICA in Winnipeg. Maestro lives and works in Canada and France.

About the author

Erín Moure is a Montreal poet. In her recent O Resplandor and—with Oana Avasilichioaei—Expeditions of a Chimæra, poetry is hybrid, and emerges in translation and collaboration. Moure has translated Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) and Louise Dupré from French, Chus Pato and Rosalía de Castro from Galician, Andrés Ajens from Chilean Spanish, and Fernando Pessoa from Portuguese. Her essay, My Beloved Wager, appeared in 2009. She performs and speaks internationally on poetry and translation, and her work has been honoured with many awards. The Unmemntioable, an investigation into subjectivity and experience in western Ukraine and Alberta, will appear in 2012.