Mae Losasso is a Research Associate at University of York and an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway University of London. She is currently working on her first book, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which explores the relationship between the work of the first-generation New York School poets and contemporaneous architectural theory and practice. Mae is the recipient of fellowships from Yale University and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and her academic work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Textual Practice, Paprika!, and Italian Modern Art. In 2021 she was invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming Contrasto book, Imaging Failure: The Abandoned Lives of the Italian South (2022), edited by Steven Seidenberg and Carolyn White. Alongside working on her monograph, Mae is also beginning work on a new research project that looks at breathlessness and crisis in modern and contemporary poetry.
By disjointing acts of listening from the ear and its particular arrangement of time, Sonic Continuum proposes a shift from representation to expression and asks: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold?
This essay explores the relationship between poetry and breath in response to our contemporary crisis of breathlessness.