Join us in welcoming Danielle Badra discussing her collection of poetry Like We Still Speak with guest, How to Prove a Theory author Nicole Tong!
About Like W Still Speak
Winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
Conversation and memory are at the heart of Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In her elegiac and formally inventive debut, Badra carries on talking with the sister and father she has lost, often setting her words alongside theirs and others’ in polyphonic poems that can be read in multiple directions. Badra invites the reader to engage in this communal space where she investigates inheritance, witnessing, intimacy, and survival.
“This is a deeply spiritual book, all the more so because of its clarity and humility. Yet, we cannot walk away from the addictive command that so many of these poems ask us to follow: to read them along plural paths whose order changes while their immeasurable spirit remains unbound. Each poem is a singular vessel—of narratives, embodiments that correspond with memories, memories that recollect passion. . . . Like We Still Speak is a sanctum. Inside it, we are enthralled by beauty, consoled by light, sustained by making.”
—Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, from the PrefaceAbout Tacky:
About How to Prove a Theory:
In this brave, elegiac debut, How to Prove a Theory, Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet's hometown after a water contamination event. In the face of loss, the poet describes grief as embodied: "I know / neither how to hold you up nor where / to safely place you down." Revelation's uncanny comfort comes as the "process called trust / keeps happening."
Readers will observe Tong's lyrical kinship with poetic predecessors Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore as she seeks to name and explain the inexplicable. Along the way, Tong turns to the visual art of Doris Salcedo, Alice Neel, Monica Cook, Joseph Cornell, and others to articulate absence through post-apocalyptic landscapes, lyrical hypotheses, and mysterious persona poems that make music more than they mourn: "You are everything / if not each moment before. O / transitivity. O verb waiting to be." Trust this poet and her collection to honor the lost and celebrate the living.
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Danielle Badra is a queer Arab American poet who was raised in Michigan and currently resides in Virginia, where she received an MFA from George Mason University. Like We Still Speak (University of Arkansas Press, 2021) is her first full-length collection. She is the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.
Nicole Tong is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fairfax County, Virginia and the author of the collection How to Prove a Theory (WWPH, 2017). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sundress Academy at Firefly Farms, and George Mason University where she received her MFA. In 2016, she served as a Writer-in-Residence at Pope-Leighey House, a Frank Lloyd Wright property in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a recipient of the President's Sabbatical from Northern Virginia Community College where she is a Professor of English. Her writing has appeared in American Book Review, CALYX, Cortland Review, and Yalobusha Review among others.
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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!
Like W Still Speak and How to Prove a Theory will be available at Lost City Books!