East Window's Banned Book Club
presents
Sirens: The Second Coming
Listening Party
by Toni Oswald
May 2, 2026
7:30-9:00pm
Co-Sponsored by Gesture Books
at East Window Gallery
4550 Broadway
Ste C-3B2
Boulder, CO 80304
info@eastwindow.org
Gesture Books invites you to an intimate Sirens listening party on May 2 (7:30-9pm) at East Window Gallery in Boulder, Colorado. This is not a typical literary event, but rather an evening of real-time presence with cell phones off, as guests are invited into an immersive experience of sound, magic, and performance art designed to awaken your senses in this world and beyond the veil. Sirens is part feminist manifesto, part surrealist awakening that tells the story of a girl born part bird who becomes a Her. Through visions of trauma, ecocide, violence, women’s work, magic, and the feminine becoming, the poetic narrative speaks with prophetic intensity to the darkness we are currently living through.
Performing as Sirens are Toni Oswald, Jade Lascelles, Heather Goodrich, Ona Herman, Catherine Leuenberger, and Sofia Marlena Rose.
Pre-orders will be available for the second edition in both hardback and paperback. The first 50 pre-orders will receive a bespoke collage made by the author, Toni Oswald. Pre-orders will also be available for the Sirens album, which includes music by Toni Oswald, Max Davies, Rod Brakes, Jade Lascelles, Heather Goodrich, Kelsey Cruz-Martin, Devin Brahja Waldman, Theresa Peterson, and Josh Klinghoffer.
We ask for your readiness and full presence for an unforgettable evening. Guests are encouraged to bring pillows, blankets, or other comfy items to lounge on the floor. Limited chairs and benches will be provided for those who are unable to sit on the floor.
$5 donation suggested at the door. No one will be turned away. Free parking.
Limited seating:
RSVP / tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sirens-listening-party-tickets-1987343346447?aff=oddtdtcreator
Blurbs for Sirens:
Sirens is here. Her is red white blue and black, nature springing. Sirens of sound poetry on one page slight, the next a garden of cusping thought. Toni Oswald’s language is her here moon rays smiling, crying, knowing, feeling the day come with its fantastic promise. Sirens is here to love in action, her a gift, a charm, a poet. Thank you, Toni.
–Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth & Ecstatic Peace Library)
This is extraordinary! Reading it out loud with my boyfriend, he said he loves surrealism, but I think this book is a form of magic revealed. Toni Oswald’s poems are so unique and brilliant, they deserve a cult following! I will join that cult, and do whatever the poems tell me to do!
–CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
In Sirens, we encounter the multi-bodied, simultaneous emergent, ever-emergine, Her. Her(e) mystical hybridity conjuncts with real life emergencies offering dazzling, pained views of the charnel grounds where we might die a thousand female deaths and finally and also: resurrect. Toni Oswald’s writing teaches us how to endure – and ultimately – celebrate the most difficult verbs.
–Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
Toni Oswald is a writer, musician/singer, actress, and visual artist, who has performed and shown her work across the United States and Europe. She has released four albums under the altar ego The Diary of Ic Explura & collaborated musically with Max Davies, Anne Waldman, John Frusciante, Josh Klinghoffer, Devin Brahja Waldman, Rod Brakes, Giselle & The Willys, along with many others. Publications include The Oyez Review, Bombay Gin, Heroes Are Gang Leaders: Giantology, The Tattered Press, Zani UK, HOAX, and the art series’ Disgust & Shame Radiant. As an actress some of her credits include Deadwood, Jackpot, Waiting for Iggy, Theatre Carnival, Acid Whorehouse, The Wilds Art Group, and the upcoming feature film, Love Luna. She recently finished her first novel, The Gorgeous Funeral, about a girl clown set in the 1950s (awaiting publication), and is currently working on an auto-mythography collection of short stories set in ‘90’s Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her book Sirens, was released by Gesture Books in 2020, and the accompanying Sirens album is upcoming in June 2026, along with a new Hardback book edition, with a foreword by Casey Niccoli. Toni likes gold teeth, cats, trees, and landscapes at night. She lives with her husband Max Davies, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado.
Photography ©2026 Jonas Leuenberger and East Window
