Porter Square Books is delighted to welcome poets Kate Colby, Elisa Gabbert, and Sommer Browning for a reading at the store! Kate will be reading from her collection Reverse Engineer, while Elisa will read from Normal Distance and Sommer from Good Actors. You can find out more about the poetry collections below!
This event will take place on Thursday, October 6 at 7:00pm at Porter Square Books: Cambridge Edition. Please note that masks will be required for all attendees. RSVPs, while not required, are strongly encouraged! Scroll down for a link to the RSVP form.
Can't make it to the event? We're always happy to set a signed copy aside for you (or put one in the mail)! If you'd like a personalization, be sure to place your order at least 24 hours before the event and include details in the Order Comments section during checkout.
About the Books
Reverse Engineer
In her ninth book of poetry, Kate Colby continues her excavation of the unknown, “the key to which breaks / the lock by breaking in it.” Operating at the junctures of perception and sensation, philosophy and grief, Reverse Engineer explores the deep recesses of human experience where
conventional language doesn’t quite reach.
Kate Colby’s eight previous books of poetry and prose include I Mean and Dream of the Trenches. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She lives in Providence.
Normal Distance
A collection of funny and thought-provoking poems inspired by surprising facts that will appeal to poetry lovers and poetry haters alike, from the author of the essay collection The Unreality of Memory, “a work of sheer brilliance, beauty, and bravery” (Andrew Sean Greer)
Known to be both “casually brilliant” (Sandra Newman) and a “ruthless self-examiner” (Sarah Manguso), acclaimed writer Elisa Gabbert brings her “questing, restless intelligence” (Kirkus Reviews) to a new collection of poetry.
By turns funny and chilling, these poems collect strange facts, interrogate language, and ask unanswerable questions that offer the pleasure of discovery on nearly every page: How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly? How bored are dogs? Which is more frightening, nothing or empty space? Was Wittgenstein sexy?
The poems in this collection are earwormy, ultracontemporary, essayistic, aphoristic, and philosophical—invitations to eavesdrop on a mind paying attention to itself. Normal Distance is a book about thinking and feeling, meaning and experience, trees and the weather, and the boredom and pain of living through time.
Elisa Gabbert, a poet, critic, and essayist, is the author most recently of The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays and The Word Pretty. She writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her next collection of essays, Any Person Is the Only Self, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Good Actors
At birth we are given a role--it is our name. GOOD ACTORS is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend. Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, GOOD ACTORS is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential.
Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Hybrid.
Sommer Browning writes poems, essays & art reviews, tells jokes. draws comics, makes videos, creates installations, hosts readings, curates exhibitions, and works as a librarian in Denver. Write her at waverlysands at gmail.
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