Join us at our Fox Point store as we welcome poets Oliver de la Paz (The Boy In The Labyrinth, University of Akron Press) and Kent Shaw (Too Numerous, University of Massachusetts Press) to the store! After the reading, de la Paz and Shaw will be in conversation together and talk about their writing process and craft, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing!

FREE + OPEN TO ALL - 107 Ives St. Providence, RI

ABOUT THE BOOKS:

THE BOY IN THE LABYRINTH:
Exquisite means, at its root, “carefully sought out,” and Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth is a book of desperate and careful seeking, a labyrinthine allegory through the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, through algebraic story problems and Autism Screening Questionaires and their inscrutable questions and more inscrutable answers, for ways of understanding the neurodiverse mind and the mind that seeks to understand what de la Paz calls “the swirling cacophony” of a boy’s brain. These labyrinthine poems—mysterious, devastating, precise in their terror of the unknowable--take us deeper into the mystery of other—and our own—minds, the X no solution can fully solves. Heartbreaking in its longing and exquisite—in the modern sense of ‘consummate and delightful excellence’— in its gorgeous threads, Boy in the Labyrinth pays homage to the exquisite textures of human minds as they seek the ultimate confrontations with the very meaning of selfhood and mind.

—Bruce Beasley, author of All Soul Parts Returned

TOO NUMEROUS:
What does it really mean when people are viewed as bytes of data? And is there beauty or an imaginative potential to information culture and the databases cataloging it? As Too Numerous reveals, the raw material of bytes and data points can be reshaped and repurposed for ridiculous, melancholic, and even aesthetic purposes. </P><P>Grappling with an information culture that is both intimidating and daunting, Kent Shaw considers the impersonality represented by the continuing accumulation of personal information and the felicities -- and barriers -- that result: "The us that was inside us was magnificent structures. And they weren't going to grow any larger.


ABOUT OLIVER DE LA PAZ:

Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

ABOUT KENT SHAW:

Kent Shaw is a graduate from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he earned my PhD. In 2003 he received his MFA from Washington University. Before his schooling, he was a Petty Officer 2nd Class (eventually) in the United States Navy, a technical writer and a day trader. He has published two books. His first book, Calenture, was published in 2008 by University of Tampa Press, and his second, Too Numerous, was awarded the 2018 Juniper Prize, published just recently by the University of Massachusetts Press. For five years, he taught at West Virginia State University. And for the past three years he has taught at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.