Fall for the Book

Come hear poets Melissa Tuckey and Nate Marshall read from a selection of their politically and culturally charged poetry.  Melissa Tuckey, editor of Ghost-Fishing: An Eco-Poetry Anthology has created the first anthology that focuses wholly on poetry with an eco-justice stance. Nate Marshall, another poetic pioneer with The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, can lay claim to editing the first poetry collection ever dedicated to and for the Hip-Hop generation.

Award-winning Catalan artist, poet and filmmaker Irene Solà’s debut poetry collection Beast was awarded the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. The Poetry Books Society calls it “a darkly imaged, startling and lyrically precise exploration of gender, identity, sexuality and multiple forms of desire.” Ben Rivers calls Beast “Sensuous, precise, and profoundly generous in their glimpses of strikingly private narratives, Sola’s poems feel perfectly placed for the strange heat of our times…” 

Enjoy an evening of poetry with four writers from around the country. Aaron McCollough is the author of several poetry collections, including the most recent, Rank, “in which forces of nature, mind, spirit, and language partake of each other in vibrant and shifting ways.” Jennifer Chang is the author of Some Say the Lark, which Natasha Trethewey calls “a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange." Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn't Have to Do With. Jericho Brown says, "The humor of Lindsay Bernal is rife with allusion to the history of American poetry tradition and cut with merciless self-reflection....These poems question what we take for granted about language and the ways our own words can bind us...."  Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, which Denise Duhamel calls “fiercely intelligent… Deulen's poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past… and anxiety for our future.”

Margaret Yocom and J. Michael Martinez’s poetry transforms historical texts to produce new works of poetry and investigation. In KIN S FUR, Yocom uses erasure-- the act of erasing words and letters from source material-- to transform the Brothers Grimm story “All Kinds of Fur” into a new and dangerous tale. Poet Katharine Young says, “these poems are haunted by what Yocom makes invisible by her erasures; what she makes visible has different bones.” J. Michael Martinez’s third collection of poetry Museum of the Americas won the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition. In it, he uses theory, poetry, creative nonfiction, and his own family lineage to explore the imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity. Sponsored by So to Speak and the Office of Student Media.