Join us for a powerful evening of poetry with these extraordinary authors: Jennifer Franklin, Iain Haley Pollock, and Sean Singer. Books by each author will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free, but we ask you to RSVP for planning purposes.
Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown University, MFA Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023). She is the recipient of a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry and a 2021 Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been anthologized and published widely in print and online including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, the Paris Review, and Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion.” Most recently, Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day” series in March 2023. She teaches poetry classes in Manhattanville’s MFA program and manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center where serves as Program Director. For more about Franklin’s poetry visit her website or follow her on IG @Jfranklinpoetry. https://www.jenniferfranklinpoet.com
If Some God Shakes Your House
Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her new collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion is the incitement to disobedience and lifelong disability the occasion for captivity. Franklin’s Antigone honors no gods, brooks no argument, and solicits no mercy. These stark, unyielding lyric persona poems bristle with defiance, sibilate with refusal, and thrum with resignation, while never wavering from the assured ear and unerring hand of a poet revisiting all-too-familiar territory. The Antigone we meet in these pages is as recognizable to us today as she was to ancient Athenians—the locus of the consequences of overweening state power, when “the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.”
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (2011), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Progressive. Pollock directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College and lives in Ossining.
Ghost, Like a Place, Iain Haley Pollock's second collection of poems and a follow up to his Cave Canem Poetry Prize winning debut, highlights the complexities of fatherhood and raising young children while bearing witness to the charged movements of social injustice and to the inequities of race in America. Memory, culpability, and our very humanness course through this book and strip us down to find joy and inspiration amid the darkness. The collection was nominated for a NAACP Image Award in 2019.
Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022) which won the 2023 National Jewish Book award. He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com
In Today in the Taxi, Sean Singer has accomplished, with remarkable succinctness, an amazing number of things: he has reinvented the picaresque for the 21st century; he has created a poetic form, the major component of which is the automobile; and he has conceived a narrator who is both Spenserian and Kafkaesque—all in stark, spare language as convincingly conversational as it is literary in the best sense of the word.” —T.R. Hummer
“I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn...Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.