Poetry Night at the Raven with Traci Brimhall and Amanda Moore

Join acclaimed poets Traci Brimhall and Amanda Moore for a wonderful night of poetry and magic at the Raven Book Store!

ABOUT THE BOOKS

A collection of poetry from the 2020 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Ocean Vuong. Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Amanda Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love. The poems that anchor this collection don’t shy away from the inevitability of a hive’s collapse and consider the succession of “requeening” a hive as “a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again.” The collapse is both physical—there are poems of illness and recovery—and emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts, the daughter becoming separate, whole, and poised to displace. The liminal spaces these poems traverse in human relationships is echoed in a range of poetic and hybrid form, offering freedom and stricture as they contemplate the way we hold one another in love and grief. Requeening is a vivid and surprising collection of poems from a winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition. 

Part murder ballad, part lullaby, this hybrid collection considers what it means to bring new life into a suffering world. Written during the trial for a close friend’s murder, Traci Brimhall's Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other––much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

ABOUT THE POETS

Amanda Moore is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New PoetsZZYZVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting; a poetry editor at Women’s Voices for Change; and a reader for VIDA Review and Bull City Press. She is also a high school English teacher and lives by the ocean in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.

Traci Brimhall has written four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod; Saudade; Our Lady of the Ruins, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, and PBS Newshour. She has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Arctic Circle Residency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD), and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

 

Event date: 
Thursday, May 19, 2022 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
Raven Book Store
809 Massachusetts St
Lawrence, KS 66044
Requeening: Poems By Amanda Moore Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780063096288
Availability: In stock at our distributor’s warehouse; will be at the Raven in 3-10 bus. days! More at ravenbookstore.com/ordering-faqs
Published: Ecco - October 26th, 2021

“A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed—yet increasingly rare—achievement.” -- Ocean Vuong


Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod By Traci Brimhall Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9781556595806
Availability: In stock at our distributor’s warehouse; will be at the Raven in 3-10 bus. days! More at ravenbookstore.com/ordering-faqs
Published: Copper Canyon Press - March 31st, 2020

Written during the trial for a close friend's murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together.


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