What happens when a poet visualizes their words? Don’t miss this unique opportunity to see renowned poet Aurora Levins Morales present her foray into the world of digital art!

Please join Aurora Levins Morales on October 23, 2025 at CANOA as she presents Ferment. You can register for the event here. We kindly ask that you wear a mask to the event.

Ferment is a digital collage and poetic prose project on chemical harm and repair. Beginning with the artist’s own drug-resistant epilepsy, linked to childhood pesticide exposure in Puerto Rico, the work moves outward through global and historical uses of chemicals of control, which, whether in agriculture or war, are made for domination.

Images and text explore the spraying of the infamous gas chamber pesticide Zyklon B on teenage Mexican domestic workers crossing the US border for daily work in the 1910s, the multigenerational impact of Agent Orange on Vietnamese children, and the toxic residues of war from the landscapes of Gaza and Ukraine to the tortured landscape of Johnston Atoll, a US military dump for leftover chemical weapons.

Inspired by the research of Malian scientists on bacteria like Pseudomonas luminescens that can break down the pesticide dieldrin, Levins Morales celebrates the transformative power of bacteria like Lactobacilis pentosus MP-10 that protects Palestinians from the heavy metals that contaminate their olives, and in hopeful contrast to Johnston Atoll, the Antarctic species Pseudomonas sp.TNT3 found on Deception Island, which can clean residues of explosives from war zones. Seeking both healing and vision, she looks to inter-species alliances with bacteria that can mend harm, and imagines a biological and social ferment that could replace control with deep collaboration and repair.

Aurora Levins Morales (b. 1954) is a Borikua Ashkenazi writer and visual artist based in Maricao, Puerto Rico. She is the author of nine books, including Silt: Prose Poems, written at the Studio. This is the first major visual art project.