Join us in welcoming Diane Thiel and Carl Marcum as they discuss their collections of poetry Questions from Outer Space and A Camera Obscura!
About Questions from Outer Space :
Compelling poems with brave, insightful, often humorous observations of the world.
Diane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.
About A Camera Obscura :
From the edge of a singularity and across desert roads at night, A Camera Obscura teleports its readers through deep space nebulae and the constructs of cityscapes to arrive at what it means to "see." Lovers embrace in sonnets and meditations move through artworks and Hubble Telescope images as these poems employ ekphrastic visions to balance the profound displacements in the most mundane aspects of our lives with science, fact, faith, and song. In the ceremonial blades of Aztec sacrifice and the anonymity of undocumented lives, these poems accrete into a solar system of images seen true, seen askance, seen in error, seen entire. A Camera Obscura is the dark room of the imagination where sīgnum--the sign, the act--becomes the tangible testaments of living.
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Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry and nonfiction, including Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies. Thiel's work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, and numerous other publications. Her awards include a PEN Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and a Fulbright. Thiel received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University and has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. She is Regents’ Professor of English and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and lives in the Sandia Mountain foothills.
Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collection Cue Lazarus, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Marcum has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. He served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011–2015. Marcum taught for many years at DePaul University in Chicago and now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the managing director of a small engineering and environmental consulting firm in the Marcellus Shale.
Questions from Outer Space and A Camera Obscura will be available at Lost City Books!