New award-winning poetry collection captures the sinister in everyday life
A molten heat flames at the center of Heather Treseler’s new poetry collection, “Auguries & Divinations” (Bauhan), winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She writes of what it is to emerge into a world, and then try to escape it for another one, and the violence and release involved with the efforts. She captures the sinister underbelly of suburbia, its quiet perversions, its everyday violations, transgressions, repressions, “a silence as lethal/ as measles,” where the slow-road peace of the cul-de-sac brings to mind drowned kittens, or rabbits, or sickly children. Anne Sexton lives between the lines here, and in them, too, “peering in windows/ wide-eyed, alert, not a stitch under her skirt.” There’s a searching quality to the poems, a way-finding. “To live is not to garner all you desire,/ to roil in your narrow shell, hard limits/ of the actual.” There are crows, sparrows, hawks, and herons, birds to remind us of how we are all migrating across time, into new existences, new desires and wonder and pain. Treseler is deeply attuned to the erotic, to the ongoing heat and want, to the mouth-on-mouth and press of bodies. How it changes, and does not, over time, the “chance to be momently carried across/ into somewhere, something, someone else.”
Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival in New Hampshire runs April 12-14
Next weekend brings the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, including a full schedule of readings, performances, an outdoor poetry carnival, workshops, and a small press fair. The festival opens on Friday with a reading from New Hampshire Teen Poetry Prize winners including Leonardo Chung, Pearl Hoekstra-Toste, and Pranavi Vedula, followed by headliners Diannely Antigua, Mckendy Fils-Aime, and Nathan McClain. On Saturday, among many other events, Heather Treseler (see item above) and Anthony Walton will discuss revision; Jennifer Martelli and Jennifer Jean will talk about publishing your poems; Oliver de la Paz, Marcus Wicker, Jennifer Militello, and Tim Liardet ponder How We Can Hope; Kali Lightfoot and Dawn Paul will offer perspectives on wilderness and writing the local; Mary Buchinger, Frances Donovan, and Jennifer Badot will host a generative workshop on dreaming your way into a poem; Allison Adair, Ben Berman, and de la Paz will showcase and discuss on-the-spot poetry; Jill McDonough will read; Bianca Stone will offer a master class; Daniel Brock Johnson and Ebele Okpokwasili-Johnson’s multimedia performance honors slain journalist James Foley. Adobo-Fish-Sauce fuses cooking and spoken word poetry. This year’s winner of the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize, Kweku Abimbola, will read with Camille Dungy, Alexandria Peary, and Kevin McClellan. Sunday closes out with a reading with Dan Harrison, Caleb Jagoda, Julia Roch, Virginia Schoff, Stone, and Myles Taylor. The festival is free and runs April 12-14. For more information and a complete schedule, visit unhpoetry.com.
Massachusetts Center for the Book offers graphic novel reading challenge for May
The Massachusetts Center for the Book offers a yearly Reading Challenge, setting a theme or prompt for each month of the year (January’s: a book you read years ago that you may feel differently about now; February, a book with a color in the title; and so on). May’s challenge is a graphic novel, and to gear up for it, MCB is offering a reading and discussion with three graphic novelists on Thursday, April 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Tufts Library in Weymouth. Joel Christian Gill, chair of the MFA in Visual Narrative at Boston University, will discuss his book “Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence.” Artist David Ortega will discuss his work, which includes the graphic novel “Días de Consuelo.” And artist, actress, storyteller, and teacher Phoebe Potts will discuss her graphic memoir “Good Eggs,” about her journey of trying to have a family. The event is free. For more information, visit massbook.org/events.
Coming out
“Short War” by Lily Meyer (A Strange Object)
“Playboy” by Constance Debre, translated from the French by Holly James (Semiotext(e))
“The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization” by Mohamed Amer Meziane (Verso)
Pick of the week
Allison S. at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Boston recommends “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography” by Audre Lorde (Crossing): “In this biomythography (history biography myth), Lorde recalls coming of age and into her identity as a Black lesbian in Harlem in the mid-20 century. In vivid, poetic writing, Lorde ushers the reader not only into her own life, but the lives of the women around her: her mother, sisters, aunts, friends, and lovers, all of whom shape the way she sees and experiences the world. The result is stunning.”