POETRY
Welcome to the Poetry Book Club! From those who love reading but can’t commit to a 300 page novel to those who studied Shakespeare sonnets in college, this book club is for anyone interested in discussing the unique, engaging, and sometimes strange genre of poetry. Join us the second Monday of every month, unless otherwise noted, to discover all that poetry can do and be :)
You can find some of Abby’s staff picks here.
Poetry Book Club will be meeting on Monday February 10th at 7 pm; we will be reading The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang.
About the book:
Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.
Poetry Book Club will be meeting on Monday March 10th at 7 pm; we will be reading Almond Blossoms & Beyond by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Mohammad Shaheen.
About the book:
The first English translation of recent poetry by the late Mahmoud Darwish, the most important Palestinian contemporary poet.
Almond Blossoms and Beyond is one of the last collections of poetry that Mahmoud Darwish left to the world. Composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained Exile cycle, Almond Blossoms holds an important place in Darwish’s unparalleled oeuvre. It distills his late style, in which, though the specter of death looms and weddings turn to funerals, he threads the pulses and fragilities and beauties of life into the lines of his poems. Their liveliness is his own response to the collection’s final call to bid “Farewell / Farewell, to the poetry of pain.”
Poetry Book Club will be meeting on Monday April 14th at 7 pm; we will be reading Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell.
About the book:
From the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse.
In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.
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