Reason & Unreason: Three Poets on Destruction, Memory & Hope

Author:

{authors}

In Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, Jill Bialosky considers the oppositions that govern us: our reason and unreason, our need to preserve and destruct, building a narrative sequence that examines her nascent calling as a writer; her sister’s suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum – to form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope. Walking through the landscape of loss, the poems in Anne Marie Macari’s Heaven Beneath: Poems explore the illness of a parent and the parallel ongoing degradation and destruction of the planet and its creatures. Beneath “paved-over space,” in the deep currents of a river, or the shadows of great trees, there’s another world, there’s a heaven, unknowable, in the muck, alive and with us, not distant or abstract. Maggie Smith, the author of Keep Moving, returns to poetry with Goldenrod: Poems, a new collection that looks at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory, pulling objects from everyday life to celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful. Moderated by Caridad Moro-Gronlier of Supporting Women Writers in Miami (SWWIM).

Sponsored by

In partnership with

Smith, Maggie

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her writing has been widely published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry, among others. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Smith captured the nation with what NPR called her “meditations on kindness and hope.” With Goldenrod: Poems (Atria/One Signal Publisher), she returns with a collection that looks at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life – a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road – she reveals the magic of the present moment. Smith can turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful. Publishers Weekly praised it as an “empathetic, wise, and honest collection … brimming with poems full of heart and feeling.”

Moro-Gronlier, Caridad

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is a Cuban American lesbian poet born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrant parents. She is the author of the chapbook Visionware, a contributing editor of Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and associate editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal. Tortillera: Poems (Texas Review Press) is her debut collection. The word “tortillera” means lesbian in Español. The moniker is familiar to most Spanish-speaking cultures, but is especially particular to the Cuban experience. In most Cuban American households, to be called a tortillera is a catcall that whips through the air like a lash whose only intention is to wound, to scar. Here, Moro-Gronlier not only applies the term to herself, she owns it, drapes it over her shoulders and heralds her truth through candid, unflinching poems that address the queer experience of coming out while Cuban. The first half of the book immediately plunges the reader into the speaker’s Cuban American life on-the-hyphen through vivid, first-person narratives. The work contained within the collection befits its audacious title – bold, original and utterly without shame. Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal: Poems, celebrated it. “An unflinching, delicious, and fierce anthem to Cuban American and queer identities, Tortillera reclaims the homophobic slur of its title, engaging and subverting the canonical tradition of the love poem.”

Macari, Anne Marie

Anne Marie Macari is the author of five collections of poetry. Her first, Ivory Cradle: Poems, won the APR/Honickman first book prize. She is also the co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books and her poetry and prose has been widely published in magazines. In Heaven Beneath: Poems (Persea), Macari writes about loss as she explores the illness of a parent and the parallel ongoing degradation and destruction of the planet and its creatures. Beneath “paved-over space,” in the deep currents of a river or the shadows of trees, there’s another world, and she summons mystery, energy, and a longing to enter, to touch, our heaven beneath, to walk with loss.

Bialosky , Jill

Jill Bialosky is the author of The Players: Poems; The Prize: A Novel; The New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir, and other titles. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and The Paris Review, among others. She also co-edited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. In Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections (Knopf), Bialosky builds a narrative sequence from more than 100 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore both darkness and sustenance. Her calling as a writer, her sister’s suicide, the horror unleashed by World War II, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, the woods where she seeks asylum – they form a moving story, and offer a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life. Katie Couric suggested that as “we grapple with a new normal, Jill Bialosky’s poetry might be the antidote we all need. Her new book Asylum, a compilation of prose and poetry, evokes despair, survival – and most importantly, hope.”

Reason & Unreason: Three Poets on Destruction, Memory & Hope