Jen Bervin, Karla Kelsey, and Celina Su join us for a night of poetry at the bookstore. The trio will read from new work and discuss their latest projects, which include a book-length poem whose form and structure is modeled on silk’s DNA structure, a lyric meditation on affect, relationality, and environment, and a collection of poems on imagined, real, and hoped-for migrations and borderlands.
Jen Bervin is an interdisciplinary artist and poet whose research-driven works weave together art, writing, science, and life. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than thirty collections, including The Walker Art Center and The J. Paul Getty Museum. She has published ten books, including Silk Poems and Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, named a Best Book of the Year by Hyperallergic and The New Yorker. Jen Bervin’s work receives support from Creative Capital and the Rauschenberg Foundation, and can be viewed on her website.
Karla Kelsey's Of Sphere, selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize, conjures a self and world that both bloom and fall apart. Given this continually unfastening attempt to make a cosmos—to equip, adorn, dress, ornament—what, this essayist wonders, is it to know, and love, and be? In constellation with the experimental prose of writers such as Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, and H.D., the book investigates ways a woman, aware she’s always becoming gendered, might resist sealing into a character according to cultural norms. Along with Of Sphere, Karla is author of three books of poetry, most recently A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014). Blood Feather, a trio of deconstructed sestinas for three voices, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Karla edits and writes for The Constant Critic and co-publishes, along with Aaron McCollough, SplitLevel Texts.
Celina Su was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book of poetry, Landia, will be published by Belladonna* in spring 2018. Her publications include two poetry chapbooks, three books on the politics of social policy and civil society, and pieces in journals such as n+1, Harper’s, and Action, Yes. Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.