2021 National Poetry Series Winner Kien Lam

Name: 2021 National Poetry Series Winner Kien Lam
Start: 2022-11-14T12:00:00-05:00
End: 2022-11-14T13:00:00-05:00
Location: On Demand

Author:

Lam, Kien, Dargan, Kyle, Halpern, Daniel

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The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This conversation features Kien Lam on Extinction Theory: Poems, speaking with the judge who selected his manuscript, Kyle Dargan, Anagnorisis: Poems. Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. He exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. With a special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.

In partnership with

Lam, Kien

Kien Lam is a poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Nation, and other publications. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about e-sports. Extinction Theory (University of Georgia Press) is a collection of pseudoscience poems – and as much about language as it is about the absence of language – with which Lam tries to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. He exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. At the heart of this collection, there is also a catalog of smaller “extinctions.” Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a doughnut.

Dargan, Kyle

Kyle Dargan is the author of five poetry collections, including Anagnorisis: Poems, The Listening, Bouquet of Hungers, Logorrhea Dementia, and Honest Engine. His poems and nonfiction have appeared in newspapers such as The Newark Star-Ledger and in journals including Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2019 he received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with Kien Lam, author of Extinction Theory (University of Georgia Press), as part of the Fair’s National Poetry Series program.

Halpern, Daniel

Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.

2021 National Poetry Series Winner Kien Lam