Booksmith hosts an evening with poets Kim Addonizio, Donna Masini, and Brittany Perham all reading from new work. Please join us!
Mortal Trash by Kim Addonizio
Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.
Kim
Addonizio has been called “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” She is the author of six poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry. Her latest are Mortal Trash: Poems (W. W. Norton) and Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundations, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her writing has appeared in New York Times, Poetry, The Sun, and numerous literary journals and anthologies. She offers poetry workshops privately in Oakland and online
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4:30 Movie by Donna Masini
In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fueled by despair and humor, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with “its engine of extras.” Masini's exquisite word play shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful foreshortened run.
Donna Masini is the author of two previous collections of poetry and one novel. She was awarded the Barnard Women’s Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and New York Foundation of the Arts grant and a grant from the National Endowment for the arts. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.
Double Portrait by Brittany Perham
Each poem in Brittany Perham's prize-winning collection links two portraits: lover and beloved, child and parent, citizen and country, spirit and body, living and dead. Each speaker investigates what it means to be in relationship to another: what does it mean to see and be seen, to reflect and be reflected, to address and be addressed? With musicality, grit, and humor, these poems challenge our conceptions of identity and language. By questioning the ways we think and speak, the ways we rehash and reshape our experience, they formalize obsession. Emotionally stirring and unapologetic, Double Portrait contemplates the nature of devotion.
Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). She is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in San Francisco.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of any of the authors' books, order below and be sure to put your request in the special field.
