Join author Karin Risko and photographer Rodney Arroyo as they share highlights of their book, A History Lover’s Guide to Detroit, an intimate tour of the city that put the world on wheels. Discover an amazing history of innovation, philanthropy, social justice, and culture.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
David joins us for a night of poetry. His title, Night Manual, is a survival guide for life—all the messy, wonderful, grieving, and self-doubting parts of life. David Hornibrook’s debut poetry collection is a book of hours that keeps time through anguish and explores the ineffable borderland of existence.
About the Book
Night Manual is a survival guide for life—all the messy, wonderful, grieving, and self-doubting parts of life. David Hornibrook’s debut poetry collection is a book of hours that keeps time through anguish and explores the ineffable borderland of existence. These are poems that seek to get at what cannot be described through a process of negation—to delineate the shape of an absence by writing the things around it.
Night Manual is divided into four sections loosely inspired by the four seasons. Each section explores the theme of absence from a slightly different proximity; as a whole, the book progresses from grief to gratitude. A major task of Hornibrook’s is to communicate the gravity and perplexity of loss while at the same time charting out a kind of liturgy of joy and wonder at the cycle of life in an ever-changing world. With lines like “My eyes are pulled to the monitor / where a universe expands or contracts, I can’t tell which” (from “The Ultrasound”) to “Facebook keeps showing Miley with her mouth open / & I keep finding little things wrong with everything” (from “Self Portrait w/ Wrecking Ball”), Hornibrook has created instructions for moving through a world suddenly disoriented by loss, a world with starlings, water birds and aliens, robots and deer, Miley Cyrus and God, black holes, and the quiet morning strangeness of a house when all the people you love are still asleep.
About the Author
David Hornibrook grew up in the suburbs of Detroit where he worked for many years as a caregiver and non-profit administrator. His poems have won multiple awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Hornibrook holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan.
Praise
David Hornibrook’s Night Manual experiments with the white spaces and stanza forms like faults and cleavages in the geology of language, the ledges and layers of image, the seismic divides of the everyday and existential. Individual poems are like cairns raised out of the near to hand. As a collection, the work achieves the sumptuously monumental.
– Thomas Lynch, The Sin Eater: A Breviary
Among the many realizations David Hornibrook offers in the unsettling comfort of his Night Manual is that structure as much as language discloses how the power of the presence of absence reveals. Hornibrook’s exploration recognizes the irrelevance today of that gnawed-on philosophical trope, ‘Who am I?’ In poems that move on the rhythms of anguish he enables us to realize the question to ask now is ‘Where am I?’ Each poem reveals the answer: whomever and whatever I am with, thus transforming ‘How then should I live?’ into ‘How then should I live with what and who are left?’ In his poem ‘Dire Country,’ Hornibrook writes, ‘It’s hard to stay safe.’ I recommend joining this gently fierce poet when he writes, ‘Instead, I sing/the names/of everyone I love . . .’ This first collection reads as the latest work by a brave and seasoned poet.
– Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press, 2013) and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press, 2019)
In Hornibrook’s lush poetry, shadows fall like silk, and words come to recover their bodies. Flora, fauna, earth and sky penetrate the skin to flourish in an ethereal symbiosis. Like O’Keeffe’s magnificent flowers, his lyrical imagery invites you to slow down, look closer, consider the veins of a leaf where ‘the wind grew a tongue / & spoke / through trees.’
– Diane DeCillis, author of Strings Attached (Wayne State University Press, 2014)
Time, space, God, nature, and wilderness is rendered in shimmering images as ‘worlds break apart’ or merge in these stunning poems. The eye is microscope, telescope, and mirror examining salvation, terror, the biblical, the quotidian. Hornibrook’s luminous work compels us to see ‘once more the first dawn.’
– Zilka Joseph, author of Sharp Blue Search of Flame (Wayne State University Press, 2016), What Dread, and Lands I Live In
Hornibrook’s poetry is that powerful combination of the cerebral and the visceral.
– Glen Young, Petoskey News
The New York Times bestselling author Garth Nix, acclaimed for his popular Old Kingdom series, returns with a new standalone novel, Angel Mage.
In Angel Mage, Nix has created a feminist fantasy set in an alternate European world ruled by fearsome magic and deadly passions.
Garth Nix is from Melbourne, Australia. A full-time writer since 2001, he has worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. His books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Guardian, and the Australian, and his work has been translated in forty-two languages.
This event is a partnership with Literati Bookstore and includes a signing with books for sale.
We welcome law professor and author Leah Plunkett in support of her recent book Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk about Our Kids Online. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
From baby pictures in the cloud to a high school’s digital surveillance system: how adults unwittingly compromise children’s privacy online.
Our children’s first digital footprints are made before they can walk–even before they are born–as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby’s hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. When school starts, there are cafeteria cards that catalog food purchases, bus passes that track when kids are on and off the bus, electronic health records in the nurse’s office, and a school surveillance system that has eyes everywhere. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone–friends, employers, law enforcement–forever. In this incisive book, Leah Plunkett examines the implications of “sharenthood”–adults’ excessive digital sharing of children’s data. She outlines the mistakes adults make with kids’ private information, the risks that result, and the legal system that enables “sharenting.”
Plunkett describes various modes of sharenting–including “commercial sharenting,” efforts by parents to use their families’ private experiences to make money–and unpacks the faulty assumptions made by our legal system about children, parents, and privacy. She proposes a “thought compass” to guide adults in their decision making about children’s digital data: play, forget, connect, and respect. Enshrining every false step and bad choice, Plunkett argues, can rob children of their chance to explore and learn lessons. The Internet needs to forget. We need to remember.
Leah Plunkett is Associate Dean for Administration, Associate Professor of Legal Skills, and Director of Academic Success at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. She is Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Nicola’s Books is excited to present critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author Markus Zusak with his newest release, Bridge of Clay.
Signing Guidelines
Only copies of Bridge of Clay purchased from Nicola’s Books will be able to be personalized. Up to two additional titles per person may be purchased from Nicola’s (either in advance of the event or at the event) to be autographed. One additional book per person may be brought from home to be autographed.
Posed photographs will not be able to be accommodated during the signing, however, attendees are welcome to take pictures during the event and as they wait in the signing line. The opportunity for posed photographs may be possible following the conclusion of the signing line. More information will be made available at the event.
*All event details, signing rules and restrictions are subject to changes beyond Schuler Books control, and often change up to and during the event. Thank you for your understanding.
About Bridge of Clay
Bridge of Clay is an unforgettable and sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, the storyteller who gave us the extraordinary bestseller The Book Thief, lauded by The New York Times as “the kind of book that can be lifechanging.”
The breathtaking story of five brothers who bring each other up in a world run by their own rules. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance.
At the center of the Dunbar family is Clay, a boy who will build a bridge–for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins, for a miracle.
The question is, how far is Clay willing to go? And how much can he overcome?
Written in powerfully inventive language and bursting with heart, Bridge of Clay is signature Zusak.
About Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak is the author of the extraordinary international bestseller The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger, an LA TimesBook Award Finalist and Printz Award Honor book. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and children.
We welcome Jon Sands as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati series, in support of his latest collection It’s Not Magic. Free and open to the public. Book signing to follow.
About the collection: Snapshots of youth, displayed with verve and sparkling clarity, in a new collection of poems that “dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand” (Richard Blanco). From jaunts through New York subways, to a Cincinnati Waffle House, to a chance encounter with one’s future life partner, Sands writes in turns autobiographically and imaginatively, drawing on voices from his private world and the public sphere to create an urgent portrait of youth that is almost rebellious in its sheer, persistent joy. Nostalgic and vivid, this collection of poems is written reverie. Selected by Richard Blanco, Jon Sands is the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series.
Jon Sands is the author of The New Clean and the cohost of The Poetry Gods podcast. His work has been featured in the New York Times and anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He’s received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Jerome Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Join “Vanishing Ann Arbor’ authors Patti Smith and Britain Woodman as they take you on a tour of our city’s past, from the places you remember to the places you don’t.
Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and David Jibson • Second and Fourth Wednesdays, 7-9 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room • Second Wednesdays are poetry workshop nights. All writers welcome to share and discuss their own poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
Fourth Wednesdays have a featured reader for 50 minutes and then open mic for an hour. All writers welcome to share. Sign up begins at 6:45 p.m. Free. Contact Ed at 668-7523; eacmorso@sbcglobal.net or cwpoetrycircle.tumblr.com.
ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.
We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.
Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.
Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!
$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.
The Michigan Quarterly Review launches its fall issue. Details and contributor bios to come. Stay tuned!
