poetry

Poetry Book Club will meet Monday, October 13th at 7pm. We will be reading GREEN OF ALL HEADS by Aracelis Girmay

About the book:

Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural -- flowers, speech -- to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: "-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --" The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.

The final meeting of 2025 for the Poetry Book Club will be Monday, November 10th at 7pm. We will be reading DEATH DOES NOT END AT THE SEA by Gbenga Adesina. You can purchase the book by clicking here.

About the book:

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry In Gbenga Adesina's debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history-a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness in America, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin-to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean ocean sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage. In a lyrical voice at once new, and surprisingly ancient, Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant's brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead