Please help us welcome back Valerie Hsiung in celebration of her new poetry collection The Naif, published by Ugly Ducking Presse! Valerie will be joined on the Glou patio (weather-permitting) by fellow poets Darcie Dennigan, Eleni Sikelianos, and Tess Brown-Lavoie, who will each read their original work, followed by a craft conversation and audience Q&A. As always, this event is free and open to all, with zero-proof drinks available and adored! :-)

ABOUT THE NAIF

The Naif lives in a practiced state of naivety—a language-fasted, resource-starved loop—and it lives as a test: of what awareness, what becoming, what imagination is possible under the scarcest of conditions, conditions that can make it impossible to deceive or beguile (others or oneself). It is a book as glass house reversed, where the person walking by can see all the way in, but the person inside can’t see halfway out—and yet the person inside has made this house. Perhaps because of the danger to the writer’s life that would result from any direct address to the Apparatus, the writer will have to commandeer the Apparatus’s own terms of “neutrality” to forge a secret path and get word (past the Apparatus) into the right hands. As though she, a language worker, under the watchful eye of the Apparatus, has been forced to create these daily logs, to send news to the other world that all is ok. So she must be careful what she says and what she doesn’t; so she does her job, and yet leaves clues throughout: all is not ok.

ABOUT VALERIE HSIUNG

Valerie Hsiung is the author of eight collections of poetry and hybrid writing, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books, forthcoming), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and outside voices, please (CSU). 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 makes fragrance & teaches at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

ABOUT DARCIE DENNIGAN

Darcie Dennigan is the author of Commander!, forthcoming from Canarium Books. Her recent piece for Annulet is "Happy Birthday Don't Die," a tribute to the awesome & forgotten The Story of Harold. She co-directs the Spatulate Church Emergency Shift.

ABOUT ELENI SIKELIANOS

Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Her tenth book of poetry, Your Kingdom, was published by Coffee House Press in winter 2023.

ABOUT TESS BROWN-LAVOIE

Tess Brown-Lavoie is author of Lite Year (2019), winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize. Tess co-founded Sidewalk Ends Farm in Providence, RI in 2011, and was the 2020-2022 Anne Waldman Fellow at Naropa University. Tess currently teaches writing to architecture students at the Pratt Institute in New York.