John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents
A Reading by Dawn Lundy Martin
Friday, March 31, 2017
Bard Hall
5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The author of Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life reads from her poems
At 5:00 p.m. on Friday, March 31, in Bard Hall, the John Ashbery Poetry Series presents a reading by Dawn Lundy Martin.
The activist poet and editor, winner of the Cave Canem Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and cofounder of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh is also the author of such books as A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, Discipline, and the forthcoming Good Stock Strange Blood.
Introduced by Ann Lauterbach and followed by a conversation and Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.
"Every time I read Good Stock Strange Blood, a new, deepened book awaits me. Which is to say, it’s got trap doors, trick sleeves; it takes swerves, detours, and dives. Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do; how the past is never past; how to stand in the blur, the 'griefmouth' of personal and collective pain and somehow—against all odds—make thought, make fury, make song. We need this resilience, this bloody reckoning, this wit and nuance, now." —Maggie Nelson
"A relentless pressure placed on the body that is fetishized, shackled, split, strangled, beaten, hated, compressed, trashed, drowned, measured, mirrored, dragged, discarded, disappeared, opened, punctured, displayed, encased. The question of 'what allows the body to survive' is at the heart of Good Stock Strange Blood. If there's an answer in this book to that question, then perhaps it has to do with how we confront and give words and breath and sound and silence to a life of meticulously drawn images that are ghostly, brutal, and vivifying." —Daniel Borzutzky
The activist poet and editor, winner of the Cave Canem Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and cofounder of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh is also the author of such books as A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, Discipline, and the forthcoming Good Stock Strange Blood.
Introduced by Ann Lauterbach and followed by a conversation and Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.
"Every time I read Good Stock Strange Blood, a new, deepened book awaits me. Which is to say, it’s got trap doors, trick sleeves; it takes swerves, detours, and dives. Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do; how the past is never past; how to stand in the blur, the 'griefmouth' of personal and collective pain and somehow—against all odds—make thought, make fury, make song. We need this resilience, this bloody reckoning, this wit and nuance, now." —Maggie Nelson
"A relentless pressure placed on the body that is fetishized, shackled, split, strangled, beaten, hated, compressed, trashed, drowned, measured, mirrored, dragged, discarded, disappeared, opened, punctured, displayed, encased. The question of 'what allows the body to survive' is at the heart of Good Stock Strange Blood. If there's an answer in this book to that question, then perhaps it has to do with how we confront and give words and breath and sound and silence to a life of meticulously drawn images that are ghostly, brutal, and vivifying." —Daniel Borzutzky
For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Bard Hall