Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and hosted by poet Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Marlon Fick, Allison Hutchcraft, and Renée Gregorio
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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. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!
Marlon L. Fick is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas–Permian Basin. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Kansas, MA in Poetics from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kansas. He has authored three poetry collections, a book of short stories, and the novel The Nowhere Man (Jaded Ibis, 2015). He’s the editor/translator of The River Is Wide / El río es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets (UNM Press, 2005), as well as XEIXA: 14 Catalan Poets (Tupelo, 2018). The Tenderness and the Wood is published by Guernica World Editions (2020). Fick has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, ConaCulta in Mexico, and Institut Ramon Llull in Catalonia. He specializes in Comparative Poetics.
Marlon L. Fick has drilled down to earthy quick—dredging up something old and something new, giving contemporary poetry a one-of-a-kind voice through persistent passion. Thus, this poet’s active meditation among worldly, searching intrigues in The Tenderness and the Wood is indeed illuming, where the human heart is a sacred and profane tuning fork. Fick knows how to go inside the hard questions of existence and deliver us to personal truth. His rhetorical leaps are risky but surefooted: “And/ a sparrow in a leafless redbud is occupied by a mute terror.” Like a seasoned musician, Marlon L. Fick’s images sing through raw, audacious, naked, mysterious feeling.
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Allison Hutchcraft is the author of Swale, named the 2019 Editor’s Choice by New Issues Poetry & Prose. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals. A former resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast, she has been awarded a fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and scholarships from the Tin House Writers Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Community of Writers. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. www.allisonhutchcraft.com
Swale looks outward to the natural world and inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller’s sea cow, gone for centuries. Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, this collection speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises—from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound—an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.
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Renée Gregorio arrived in Taos, NM in 1985 to complete a master’s thesis for a creative writing M.A. through Antioch University, London, and never left. Her poetry is informed equally by the stillness, expansiveness and landscape of northern New Mexico as it is by her wide-ranging travels to places such as Cuba, Bali, Italy, England, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and India. Her published collections include Abyss & Bridge, The Skins of Possible Lives, The Storm That Tames Us, Drenched, Water Shed and Snow Falling on Snow. Collaborative books include Love & Death: Greatest Hits (with Joan Logghe & Miriam Sagan), Unmasking the Fire and Road to the Cloud’s House (with John Brandi). Renée has worked as a freelance literary editor, a proofreader, and drafter for the state legislature, a writing teacher, and a somatic coach. She’s a co-founder of the publishing collective, Tres Chicas Books. http://www.reneegregorio.com
The poems in Renée Gregorio’s Abyss & Bridge tell of the ways that travel can serve to enlarge what is possible between human beings from differing cultures. The book centers on both travel and return, what is required to open oneself to a new world and unpredictable situations, and how one’s sense of camaraderie with others is deepened through dialogue. The main thematic thread is, as one of the poems states: “searching for that common language / that connects to the wide sea / as much as the sea within.” In this radiant collection, difference provides a necessary bridge that returns us to ourselves and to each other and shows us how to move out, and move back in, with a new sense of belonging, both to the world at large and to a sense of place.
This book is currently on backorder. Please call or email for availability.
