Poetry

Join three poets for readings from their latest collections.

Magicians, wig makers, sculptors, perfumers, choreographers, and composers all help conjure the worlds of Frank's second collection, The Spokes of Venus. These poems offer a landscape shaped by the tensions between the act of making and the art of observing. If music and art are the sisters of poetry, this collection is a chorus a glorious one of siblings arguing and singing.

Adam Scheffler is the author of A Dog's Life (Jacar Press 2016), which was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the Jacar Press Full–Length Poetry Book Contest.

Grid Books celebrates the publication of Cold Storage by Keith Althaus, winner of the 2016 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, with a reading by the author and by past winners Patricia Corbus and Dicko King.

Megan Snyder-Camp grew up in Baltimore and earned a BA at Oberlin College and an MFA at the University of Washington.

Tim Suermondt is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance, Just Beautiful, and Election Night And The Five Satins, along with three chapbooks. He has poems published in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, december Magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, The Southeast Review, Poetry East, and Barrow Street, among others. He is a book reviewer for Cervena Barva Press and a poetry reviewer for Bellevue Literary Review.

Finally: a posthuman translation of Shakespeare. I'm glad Daniel Y. Harris beat Watson at it. There are still large chunks of human in his kind lineation." — Andrei Codrescu, author of Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes)

Join two poets for readings from their new collections, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria and Steel.

In Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Martha Collins relentlessly traces the history of scientific racism from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair through the eugenics movement of the 1920s. Using a wide variety of documentary sources, including her Illinois grandfather’s newspaper, Collins constructs a “scrapbook” of fragments, quotations, narrative passages, and lyrical riffs that reveal startling connections between the Fair, the Bronx Zoo, and ideas that culminated in anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and eugenic sterilization laws in 1924.

Clint Smith's debut poetry collection, Counting Descent, is a coming of age story that seeks to complicate our conception of lineage and tradition.

Tess Taylor is the author of The Forage House, finalist for the Believer Poetry Award, and Work & Days. An avid gardener and cook, she dropped out of Amherst College in her twenties to become a translator and chef’s assistant at L’Ecole Ritz Escoffier in Paris. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in publications including the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, and the New York Times. She is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. She lives in El Cerrito, CA.

Stephen Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. His essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other works include The Art of the Sonnet, Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry, Parallel Play: Poems, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and His Age, and Popular Music. His latest collection of poems, Belmont, was published by Graywolf Press in 2013.

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog, At the Point, To Keep Time and Illocality as well as 13 chapbooks and various limited-edition broadsides and folios. Massey’s work has also appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation, A Public Space, American Poet, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation.