Wesleyan University Press Showcase

About this event

City Lights and Wesleyan University Press celebrate new seasonal work with Carol Ann Davis, Edgar Garcia, Cindy Juyoung Ok, and Sandra Simonds. Each year Wesleyan University Press produces exemplary work in their poetry series. City Lights is pleased to be featuring these poets in an evening of readings. About SONGBIRD by Carol Ann Davis: Utilizing the short lyric poem in long sequence, Songbird addresses matters both urgent and ancient: what it is to grow from a child into an adult, how to remain inside one’s body, what it means to open the mouth and sing. Guided by the images, senses, and sounds provided to her by the natural world, the poet invents a stuttering natal language to approach the unsayable aspects of interior life. In doing so, the poems collectively trouble the binaries that beset modern existence: the simultaneous push-pull of sexual desire; the interior and exterior landscapes that shape our perceptual fields; the reckoning of violence with beauty; the human need for both permanency and flight. Songbird is a daring and necessary book. CAROL ANN DAVIS is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), and a collection of essays, The Nail in the Tree (2020). A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is Director of the Low-Residency MFA and founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that provides poetry curricula to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol Ann has read her work at the Library of Congress, Poets House, on the website of the PBS NewsHour, and at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Her work regularly appears in literary magazines and periodicals, including The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Georgia Review, Image, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review, and Agni. About CANTARES by Edgar Garcia: Cantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican poetics. Edgar Garcia reimagines the Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl songs from Central Mexico, and brings these songs to life not just as historical documents, but as music, to give presence of thought to their historical layers and complexities. His adaptations evoke the sound and texture of the sixteenth century, blending Indigenous and Baroque traditions, exploring themes of translation, adaptation, race, and historical memory. The collection moves between poetry and scholarship—between poems and micro-essays. The essays provide commentary and historical context about the colonial soundscape of Central Mexico. At the same time, the poems emphasize the songs’ sonic, spiritual, and poetic dimensions. EDGAR GARCIA is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu. About THE HELL OF THAT STAR (translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok): The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror. When slapped seven times by a government censor, Kim responded with defiant poems. The death of language becomes a death of the writer; within death, Kim finds new life in fragmentation and reorientation. This singular volume provides a wild and rigorous study of the words of the nation-state and the self, as well as the deprivations, detainments, and surprises in between. In evading censorship, Kim’s poems question, twist, and transmute; language is a site where the personal and political meet to escape containment, emptiness, and domestication. The book includes essays by the author and translator. KIM HYESOON has published fourteen Korean poetry collections and been translated into several languages. A winner of the Midang, Griffin, and Cikada poetry prizes, she lives in Seoul where she was a creative writing professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets (2024). About BURNING ORACLE by Sandra Simonds: Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra—seer, mother, survivor—wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma—particularly the Holocaust—and seeks meaning in the act of remembering. As floods rise and fires rage, the personal and historical ignite a mythic voice. Through the commonplace of stained dresses, shattered screens, and supermarket aisles, Cassandra encounters figures like Goya, Reynard the fox, and Celan himself, weaving their stories into an intertextual, image-rich landscape. Burning Oracle is a feminist reckoning, a personal mythography, and a testament to the power of poetry to animate the archive of history, memory, and everyday life. SANDRA SIMONDS is professor of English [SS2] and Humanities at Thomas University and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022). Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Founded in 1957, Wesleyan University Press quickly established itself as one of the nation’s outstanding scholarly publishers of interdisciplinary work in the humanities and poetry. Over its lengthy history, it has published exceptional works of scholarship as well as books of wide interest to general readers. The Press has garnered national and international accolades for its work, including six Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three Griffin Poetry Prizes, and an Anisfield-Wolf Award, among many others. Wesleyan publishes approximately twenty new books each year, primarily in the fields of music, dance, and the arts, including 6-8 titles each year in poetry. Since 1957, the Press has published over 1,500 books, nearly 1,000 of which are still in print, and has distributed over 3.5 million books—all bearing the WUP imprint—across the world. The mission of Wesleyan University Press is to identify and publish books of creative and scholarly distinction, including original poetry and groundbreaking interdisciplinary studies in the arts and humanities. We are committed to publishing works of lasting value—books of beauty and daring that harness the power of language to engage an inclusive community of readers. This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. (via City Lights)

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