Jul
22
1:30am
Poetry Night with Tin House: Hanif Abdurraqib, Destiny O. Birdsong, Megan Fernandes, and Ariana Reines
By DIESEL, A Bookstore
Join us on Tuesday, July 21st at 6:30 pm for a virtual event in partnership with Tin House presenting a night of poetry with Hanif Abdurraqib, Destiny O. Birdsong, Megan Fernandes, and Ariana Reines!
This event is free to attend and all are welcome.
📷Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and was nominated for a Hurston Wright Legacy Award. His collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a best book of 2017 by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and Pitchfork, among others. His Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller.
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, music critic, and New York Times bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and finally admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off in the '98 finals. It's about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared, and how black people can write about flowers at a time like this. Abdurraqib writes across different tones and registers, with humor and sadness, and uses touchstones from the world outside -- from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs -- to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
📷Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and won the Academy of American Poets Prize, Naugatuck River Review’s 2016 Narrative Poetry Contest, and Meridian’s 2017 “Borders” Contest in Poetry. She earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University, and now lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body -- a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to Black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow Black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity -- both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.
📷Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize (2018) and the Saturnalia Book Prize (2018). Fernandes holds a PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College.
In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes's Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging-just barely-on the trains and bridges and barstools of New York City. A child of the Indian ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the "hydrogen fruit" of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.
📷Ariana Reines, named one of Flavorwire’s 100 Most Important Living Writers and “a crucial voice of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt, she is a poet, Obie-winning playwright, & performing artist. Her books include A Sand Book, the play Telephone, The Origin Of The World, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow..
A Sand Book is a poetry collection in twelve parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” to Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.
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