Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets! In January, we welcome Kathy Goodkin, author of Crybaby Bridge; Eric Tran, author of The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer; and Lesley Wheeler, author of The State She's In. Poet and Poetrio Coordinator Mildred K Barya will host.
Click here to RSVP. The link required to attend will be emailed on the day of the event.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors' books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop's. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may also make a donation or purchase a gift card below. Thank you!
Kathy Goodkin is the author of poetry collections Crybaby Bridge, winner of the Moon City Poetry Award (Moon City Press, 2019), and Sleep Paralysis (dancing girl press, 2017). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Cream City Review, RHINO, Redivider, The Volta, and elsewhere. She has served as an editor for feminist publisher Gazing Grain Press and a manuscript consultant for the North Carolina Writer's Network. She lives in North Carolina in a house full of daughters and dogs.
In poem after poem, the pages of Crybaby Bridge present a series of tiny revelations, like in "Spontaneous Generation" "I got alive / the same as you: / salt made // a small
reckoning." It's all so simple, so right there--but poet Kathy Goodkin's sweeping floodlights allow us to see it. In this book, Goodkin observes an ordinary world with its small tragedies and workaday beauties--forests and fields that give way to housing developments, balloons blooming outside a party store, cars winched from rivers--and she gives it to readers straight. Goodkin's several poems titled "Sleep Paralysis" offer a helpful lens for understanding the pictures each poem presents. When you can't look away, you get a chance to take it all in, the reservoir, the larkspur, the slow and insistent layered growth of a city.
Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese writer and a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC, where he is also an associate editor at Orison Books. His debut book of poems, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, won the Autumn House Press Emerging Writer's contest. He is also the author of the chapbooks Revisions and Affairs with Men in Suits. His work has been featured in Poetry Daily and Best of the Net and appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. https://veryerictran.com/about
In The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, Eric Tran contends with the aftermath of a close friend's suicide while he simultaneously explores the complexities of being a gay man of color. Grief opens into unraveling circles of inquiry as Tran reflects on the loss of his friend and of their shared identity as gay Asian American men. Through mourning and acute observations, these poems consider how those who experience marginalization, the poet included, may live and fall victim to tragedy. Tran explores how his life, even while in the company of desire and the pursuit of freedom, is never far from danger. Like grief that makes the whole world seem strange, Tran's poetry merges into fantasy lands and rides the lines between imagined worlds and the reality of inescapable loss. At the intersection of queerness, loss, and desire, Tran uses current events, such as the Pulse nightclub tragedy, pop culture references, and comic book allusions to create a unique and textured poetry debut. He employs an unexpected pairing of prayer and fantasy allowing readers to imagine a world of queer joy and explore how grief can feel otherworldly. This collection shows a poet learning how to be afraid, to feel lost, to grieve, and to build a life amid precarious circumstances. The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize in 2019.
Lesley Wheeler's new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as The Common, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review, and she is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah. She lives in Lexington, Virginia.
The tinder of Lesley Wheeler's latest collection of poems ignites a tremendous bonfire with the glow of both history and the future illuminated in the present dark. In poem after exquisite poem she writes of both the spark and the ember, where 'Scent resonates / even though the blooms are closed.' Here in her breathtaking work the landscapes of the past are indelibly linked with our hardwired present.--Oliver De La Paz
This book is currently on backorder. Please call or email for availability.
This book is currently on backorder. Please call or email for availability.
This book is currently on backorder. Please call or email for availability.
This book is currently on backorder. Please call or email for availability.