Feb
14
12:30am
Meet Me There: Featuring Joan Larkin and Katherine Fallon
By Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
"Meet Me There" is a monthly intergenerational poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction experience curated by trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist Samuel Ace. Writers exploring genre and gender boundaries will be a special focus of this series. This event usually takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7:30pm ET. Some months our readings will take place at Charis Books with an option to watch virtually, and some months the event will be fully virtual, so be sure to check the listing!
February's featured poets are Joan Larkin and Katherine Fallon in celebration of their collections, Old Stranger: Poems and Demoted Planet.
Featured Poet
Joan Larkin's sixth collection of poems, Old Stranger, was published by Alice James Books in August 2024. Previous titles include My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Publishing Triangle, Audre Lorde award, and Blue Hanuman, both published by Hanging Loose Press. A lifelong teacher and poet, she co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s surge in feminist publishing and co-edited the groundbreaking anthologies Amazon Poetry and Gay Lesbian Poetry in Our Time. Her honors include Lambda and NEA awards, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
In this sixth collection from a beloved American poet, the reader is asked to reflect on the stranger within others--and ourselves. The speaker in Old Stranger: Poems begs to be seen and known, even when faced with her aging and her own mortality. Even as we age, there's a looming space for the mysterious stranger we embody without realizing it. Do we ever truly know who we are? In the book, familiarity takes so many forms, as does the stranger: sometimes the stranger is a loved one, sometimes it is the speaker to themselves, and other times it's one who might seem like a stranger in the poem but turns out to be recognizable in one or more ways. We are looking back, but at the same time we are so much in the present, there's an in-betweenness of the temporal that is so dreamlike and delicious. The poems are suspended and feel weightless even as their subjects are weighty and, at times, dark.
Featured Poet
Katherine Fallon is the author of the chapbooks The Toothmakers’ Daughters (Finishing Line Press), Zero Sum(Bottlecap Press), The Book on Fractures (Ghost City Press), and Demoted Planet (Headmistress Press), which was the finalist for the 2021 Georgia Book Award. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in AGNI, Meridian, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Atticus Review, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth, The Boiler, Sugar House Review,and others, and was included in Best New Poets 2019. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the founding editor of Whittle Micro-Press.
Mournful and flawless, bereaved and elegant, these breathtaking poems in [Demoted Planet] bend low like five widowed giraffes teaching themselves how to go under the limbo bar of grief for the first time. They take the readers into the impeccable sound that a semi makes when it crushes five female nursing students or to a place where you can't ever gaze at the cocktail shrimp or the refrigerator and its forehead the same way. These poems have a way of making you want to wear jeans again after a decade spent with a type of lingerie called khakis. - Vi Khi Nao, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize.
Host Poet
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer and sound artist. His latest books are I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* 2019). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Fence, BathHouse, The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.
The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person the night of the event.
Please contact us at [email protected] or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected]. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to [email protected] immediately.
hosted by
Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
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