Join us for a poetry reading and the celebration of three amazing poets and their new and familiar published poetry collections: Carrie Oeding's second collection of poems, If I Could Give You a Line, won the Akron Poetry Prize, selected by Erika Meitner (The University of Akron Press, March 2023), Valerie Hsiung’s book The Only Name We Can Call it Now is Not Its Only Name (Counterpath Books, March 2023), and Mary-Kim Arnold’s The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press, 2020).
The three poets will read from their respective works and follow the reading with a craft conversation between themselves and you, the audience! This event is free and open to all!
ABOUT THE BOOKS
If I Could Give You a Line by Carrie Oeding
What does it mean to make something to share publicly when you are unsure of your own presence? If I Could Give You a Line cultivates the strangeness of presence in motherhood when the self is hyper-aware of its erasure. The collection explores its obsession with the physicality of visual art, down to the line, asserting and creating a voice that longs to be as present as a waver in the line of an Agnes Martin painting. A line that pulls you in to see the hand that made it. For Oeding's speakers, to look at art as mothers gives them permission to make it. Through humor, provocation, and uncertainty, this associative work builds momentary worlds of looking and connecting. The voice in these poems are confident in their performance and gesture to the reader to participate in their world-building, using materials like toddler garbage, preliterate scribbles, boiled green beans, James Turrell's skies, Cara Delevingne's eyebrows, and Yayoi Kusama's mirrors.
The Only Name We Can Call it Now is Not Its Only Name by Valerie Hsiung
Unspooling from a mysterious and deeply discomforting encounter between the speaker and "K," THE ONLY NAME WE CAN CALL IT NOW IS NOT ITS ONLY NAME slowly morphs into a long and impossibly personal examination of willfulness and ownership, mother tongue and mother earth, chronic illness (of body and soil), homelessness and exile, violence and place, severance and longing, private parts and public spaces, intimacy and institution, affliction and ardor, performativity, faciality, vernaculars, voice, filth, instinct, and clowning. Written in a suspended moment when Hsiung experienced a profound crisis of silence in her life, what begins as a truly hybrid interrogation of an interrogation between student and teacher contorts into an entangled and incantatory excavation of the origins of a poet's psyche and relationship with the world itself. A work that was not composed but decomposed by way of worms and flies and a hazardous exposure to the elements of mythology, ecology, and epistemology, The only name we can call it now is not its only name is both a perennial coalescing convalescence between individual and societal specters and the tectonic documentation of a repeated attempt to endure.
The Fish & The Dove by Mary-Kim Arnold
THE FISH & THE DOVE considers the history of occupation, the legacy of the Korean War, and the ways in which official and institutional language of war obfuscates lived experience. In it, I bear witness to what girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood might mean in the context of family, nation, and history. The legendary Assyrian warrior goddess Semiramis haunts this book, and by giving her voice, I attempt to foreground women's experience in narratives that so often tokenize, dehumanize, and exclude them. The text is informed by and appropriates institutional language, including reports of the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission on governmental atrocities committed during the Korean War.
THE AUTHORS
Carrie Oeding
Carrie Oeding's book of poems, Our List of Solutions, was the winner of the Lester M. Wolfson prize and published by 42 Miles Press. Her second poetry collection, If I Could Give You a Line, won the Akron Poetry Prize, selected by Erika Meitner (The University of Akron Press, March 2023). Her poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in such places as Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Brevity, and Denver Quarterly. She is the 2020 recipient of Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
Valerie Hsiung
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of multiple poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming 2024), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, 2023), To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize, Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Believer, Chicago Review, digital vestiges, The Nation, New Delta Review), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Mary-Kim Arnold
Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, and educator. She currently serves as Assistant Dean for Equity & Inclusion in Teaching & Learning at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press). Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.
Mary-Kim has received several fellowships and awards, including the 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly. In 2021, she was appointed by the Governor to serve on the Board of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She also serves on the Board of the Providence Athenaeum. Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.