Poets Darcie Dennigan, author of THE PARKING LOT AND OTHER FERAL SCENARIOS (Forklift, 2018), Mary-Kim Arnold, author of LITANY FOR THE LONG MOMENT (Essay Press, 2018), and S. Tourjee, author of SAM SAYS SAM (Spuyten Devil, 2018) come together to read, muse, and discuss their poetry and newly published collections. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Mary-Kim Arnold | The orphan at the center of LITANY FOR THE MOMENT is without homeland and without language. In an extended lyric essay, Mary-Kim Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Born in Korea and adopted to the U.S. as a child, she explores the interconnectedness of language and identity through the lens of migration and cultural rupture. Invoking artists, writers, and thinkers –Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Francesca Woodman, Susan Sontag, among others – Litany for the Long Moment interweaves personal documents, images, and critical texts as a means to examine longing, loss, and identity.

S. Tourjee | “Sam Says, Sam is alive with bird and “potential bird,” a powerful meditation on claiming one’s place and one’s possibilities in the world. Tourjee’s extended series of taut, precise phrases reveals a mind intensely at work, encountering the insufficiencies of the body and the limitations of language and category. Sam Says, Sam is a work of self-creation and self-transformation and as readers, we witness, transfixed, the poet uttering the self into existence, “exposed, “on the verge of it,” and then, triumphantly, “unafraid.” – Mary-Kim Arnold

Darcie Dennigan | "Darcie Dennigan's accounts of psychic states masquerading as disappearances are so striking, even luscious, that you may wish they were realities, even though she writes of great loss and unendurable pain. We see her Reporter every day on every TV news show, looking serious in a place of nothing, and telling us "I'm standing at the spot where-" invariably some horror happened. Mothers lose their children, often to animals, like Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark; and girls lose their proto-boyfriends and, years, later can't even remember how they died or even if they died. Behind Dennigan's "gone girls," the spirits of Kafka and Borges, and perhaps the shadow of Bhanu Kapil, wait and nod their heads in the great pity of fullness. Read "The Parking Lot" if you want to wrap your hand round the live wire of a miracle." —Kevin Killian