Join us in welcoming Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Rax King as they discuss their books Dreaming of You and Tacky, poetry, culture, and more!
About Dreaming of You:
A macabre love story in verse about celebrity, loss, and longing following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead.
Absurd, lyrical, and heartfelt, Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Dreaming of You is a genre-bending novel in verse that examines questions of death, love, celebrity, and queer identity.
Melissa, a young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache, brings Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as Melissa journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. An eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story, and an interrogation of Latinidad, womanhood, obsession, and disillusionment, Dreaming of You grapples with the cost of being seen for your truest self.
About Tacky:
An irreverent and charming collection of deeply personal essays about the joys of low pop culture and bad taste, exploring coming of age in the 2000s in the age of Hot Topic, Creed, and frosted lip gloss --from the James Beard Award-nominated writer of the Catapult column Store-Bought Is Fine"
Tacky is about the power of pop culture--like any art--to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to good taste. These fourteen essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love--snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu--into kinder and sharper perspective.
Each essay revolves around a different maligned (and yet, Rax would argue, vital) cultural artifact, providing thoughtful, even romantic meditations on desire, love, and the power of nostalgia. An essay about the gym-tan-laundry exuberance of Jersey Shore morphs into an excavation of grief over the death of her father; in You Wanna Be On Top, Rax writes about friendship and early aughts girlhood; in another, Guy Fieri helps her heal from an abusive relationship.
The result is a collection that captures the personal and generational experience of finding joy in caring just a little too much with clarity, heartfelt honesty, and Rax King's trademark humor.
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Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a Guatelombian (Guatemalan-Colombian) American poet and screenwriter living in Brooklyn by way of Massachusetts. Her book peluda (Button Poetry 2017) explores the intersections of Latina identity, feminism, hair removal & what it means to belong. Her novel-in-verse Dreaming of You is about bringing Selena back to life through a seance & the disastrous consequences that follow & it’s coming out October 2021 on Astra House. She is the co-host of podcast Say More with Olivia Gatwood Who Is a Massive Bitch where they dissect the world through a poetic lens. She is currently working on a pilot about a haunted book store. She is interested in horror because she's scared of everything. She likes when things are little funny so that she has space to be a little sad. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in REMEZCLA, PAPER, The Guardian, BreakBeat Poets, Kenyon Review, Vulture, Bustle, Glamour Magazine, The Huffington Post, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and BBC Mundo!
Rax King is a James Beard award-nominated bitch. She is the author of Tacky (Vintage 2021) and co-host of the podcast Low Culture Boil. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her toothless pekingese.
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This event will be hosted in-person at Lost City Books! Masks will be required of attendees.
Accessibility note: This event will be held up two fight of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
Dreaming of You and Tacky are available at Lost City Books!