Literati is pleased to welcome poets Adam Giannelli and Tommye Blount who will be reading from their latest collections Tremulous Hinge and What We Are Not For.
About Tremulous Hinge:
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia–in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn. Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”
From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves–a stutterer’s maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation–become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
About What We Are Not For:
Through biography, fairy tale, and history, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR redraws the fatherland of manhood as a territory beyond whose borders tenderness and cruelty fight for space. The men and boys in these poems are transformed into instruments of pleasure and of destruction, worshipped artifacts and disfigured toys, victims and assailants. WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR moves its reader toward caustic longing, the hope that danger and risk promise.
“Tommye Blount’s WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR is an instruction manual on how to fall to our knees and crawl from the mouth of failed transformations. Here, Pinocchio’s boyhood demands bloodspill for proof and the speaker’s humanity is never fulfilled: ‘After all, I am a broken animal.’ Desire turns toward the darkest trail and does not look back through challenging forms and twisted prosody. This collection is rope and whip, daughter-sons and muzzles, and ‘a prayer they mistake/ for a growl.’ I am not myself, any longer, after these poems.’ Phillip B. Williams”
Adam Giannelli’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem, and the editor of High Lonesome, a collection of essays on Charles Wright. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye Blount now lives in the nearby suburb of Novi, Michigan. He has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Phantom, Four Way Review, The Offing, Vinyl, and other publications. He holds an MFA from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Literati is pleased to welcome Paul Vachon who will be sharing his new book Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline.
About Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline
Let’s talk a walk a long walk, back over three centuries. At the dawn of the eighteenth century Detroit was established as simply an outpost for the French to take advantage of the fur trade while keeping the British at bay. Over the subsequent 300 plus years this small settlement advanced to become a regional hub of commerce, a focal point of nineteenth century industrial strength, and ultimately the nexus of the auto business–the industry that redefined mobility and in doing so changed the course of world history.
Detroit’s long evolution occurred along an often rocky path, marked by a devastating fire, military conquests, conflicts with southern slave hunters, a burgeoning population, all while enduring persistent racial tensions and insurrection. As the Arsenal of Democracy the city proved essential to the allied victory in World War II; but the following decades proved ruinous. As the city bled people and resources, whole areas were decimated–yet nonetheless poised for a rousing comeback.
This book points out many of the seminal events and noteworthy turning points of Detroit’s long journey, some little known: the city’s fall to the British during the War of 1812, the existence of slavery in Detroit as late as the 1820s, and Mayor Hazen Pingree’s aggressive advocacy for the everyday citizen against corporate interests.
Chapters devoted to the twentieth century highlight Detroit’s underappreciated architectural heritage, the development of its notable cultural institutions, as well as the exploits of assorted scoundrels, such as the Black Legion, the Purple Gang, Harry Bennett and Father Charles Coughlin.
Triumphant sports teams, the contributions of religious leaders, and courage of civil rights leaders are all brought to life, completing this chronological sketch of America’s city of the straits.
A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Paul Vachon is an author, freelance writer and public speaker. He possesses a strong interest in Detroit history, and has written four previous books devoted to the subject. He’s also written guidebooks on Michigan travel. Paul is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In his spare time, Paul enjoys traveling and nature photography. He also thinks having a map of the state on the back of his left hand is pretty cool.
Literati is thrilled to welcome novelist Jessica Francis Kane who will be sharing her new book Rules for Visiting.
About Rules for Visiting:
A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.
At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she’s turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm’s length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?
RULES FOR VISITING is a woman’s exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way–afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends’ perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.
Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story–and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.
Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.
We welcome award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, in support of her debut novel Kickdown, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series! Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Emily Strelow, author of The Wild Birds. The event is free and open to the public.
About Kickdown:
When Jackie Dunbar’s father dies, she takes a leave from medical school and goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: the Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, and the oil and gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally and figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land.
There is fencing to be repaired and calves to be born, and no one–except Jackie herself–to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, and the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, and ignite new ones.
Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters and the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless and timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, and environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf’s Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, and perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.
Rebecca Clarren, an award-winning journalist, has been writing about the rural West for nearly twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, the Nation, and Salon.com. Kickdown, shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, is her first novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two young sons.
Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The Wild Birds is her first novel.
Poetry readings are scheduled the 4th Wednesday of each month. These events feature a reading by one or more published poets, followed by an Open Mic at which anyone is welcome to read something of their own or a favorite poem.
Marilynn Rashid teaches basic, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language and composition classes, intermediate literature classes, and the Spanish translation class at Wayne State. Her interests include Comparative Literature and the theory and practice of literary translation. Poetry awards include:
Judith Pearson Siegel Award for Poetry, WSU English Department, 1993
Finalist in New Issues Poetry Contest, Western Michigan University, 1997
Nominated for Pushcart Prize, 2001
Special Merit Award for Poetry, Comstock Review, 2009
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Clayton Eshelman who will be reading from his new collection Pollen Aria.
About Pollen Aria:
That Clayton Eshleman has not ceased from exploration over a career spanning more than 60 years is witnessed by the bulk, range, and diversity of his prior work. Now in his 80’s Eshleman presents us with a last collection of his poems-mostly recent, a few older. That he has sought to open up his life and work, to entwine and entangle it with others, through observation and vision, research and scholarship, translation and editing, and collaboration and conversation, all of this reflects Eshleman’s life commitment, indeed a commitment to life in writing poetry.
Clayton Eshleman has had published roughly 100 books and chapbooks of original poetry, translations, and nonfiction writings, and edited seventy issues of magazines and journals, including the ground-breaking Caterpillar and Sulfur. His writings have appeared in over 500 literary magazines and journals around the world and his books and writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He has won many poetry awards, fellowships, and translation awards for his works through the years. It is undoubtedly unnecessary to observe that he made and has fulfilled a life commitment to poetry. Now in his 80’s he resides with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, MI.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
As part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati Series, we welcome author Stephen Markley in support of his bestselling debut, Ohio, which NPR called “a wild, angry and devastating masterpiece of a book.” This event is free and open to the public.
About the book: Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country’s forgotten pockets, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.
On one pivotal summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park and now back to “The Cane” with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her former lover’s mother; Dan Eaton, a veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a date with a woman he’s tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax.
“[ Ohio is] a descendant of the Dickensian ‘social novel’ by way of Jonathan Franzen: epic fiction that lays bare contemporary culture clashes, showing us who we are and how we got here” ( O, the Oprah Magazine). “Markley is one of the first novelists to fully reflect the social forces at work without sacrificing an iota of character work or narrative tension” ( New York magazine), and Ohio captures the fractured zeitgeist of a nation, offering a prescient vision for America at the dawn of a turbulent new age.
About the author: Stephen Markley is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Markley’s previous books include the novel Ohio, the memoir Publish This Book The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book, and the travelogue Tales of Iceland. He lives in Los Angeles.
As part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati Series, we welcome New York Times-bestselling author Susan Jane Gilman in support of her latest, Donna Has Left the Building, which author Boris Fishman calls an “engrossing and incisive–politically, domestically, psychologically–story.” The event is free and open to the public.
About the book:Forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski is an ex-punk rocker, a recovering alcoholic, and the mother of two teenagers whose suburban existence detonates when she comes home early from a sales conference in Las Vegas to the surprise of a lifetime. As her world implodes, she sets off on an epic road trip to reclaim everything she believes she’s sacrificed since her wild youth: Great friendship, passionate love, and her art. But as she careens across the U.S. from Detroit to New York to Memphis to Nashville, nothing turns out as she imagines. Ultimately, she finds herself resurrected on the other side of the globe, on a remote island embroiled in a crisis far bigger than her own.
About the author: Susan Jane Gilman is the bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Kiss My Tiara, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, and the novel, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street. She has provided commentary for NPR and written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Ms. Magazine, among others. Visit her at SusanJaneGilman.com.
We welcome author Dean Kuipers in support of his new memoir, The Deer Camp, which Kirkus describes as “lushly detailed and full of eco-devotion.”
About the book: For readers of The Stranger in the Woods and H Is for Hawk, a beautifully written and emotionally rewarding memoir about a father, his three sons, and a scrappy 100-acre piece of land in rural Michigan. Bruce Kuipers was good at hunting and fishing, but not at anything else that makes a real father or husband. Distant, angry, and a serial cheater, he destroyed his relationship with his wife, Nancy, and alienated his three sons–journalist Dean, woodsman Brett, and troubled yet brilliant fisherman Joe. He distrusted people and clung to rural America as a place to hide. So when Bruce purchased a 100-acre hunting property as a way to reconnect with his sons, they resisted. The land was the perfect bait, but the moment the sons arrived, none of them knew how to be together as a family. Conflicts arose over whether the land–an old farm that had been degraded and reduced to a few stands of pine and blowing sand–should be left alone or be actively restored. After a decade-long impasse, Bruce acquiesced, and his sons proceeded with their restoration plan. What happened next was a miracle of nature. Dean Kuipers weaves a beautiful and surprising story about the restorative power of land and of his own family, which so desperately needed healing. Heartwarming and profound, The Deer Camp is the perfect story of fathers, sons, and the beauty and magic of the natural world
About the author: Dean Kuipers has studied and written about the field of environmental politics and the human-nature relationship for decades. He is the author of Burning Rainbow Farm and Operation Bite Back. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Outside, The Atlantic, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, andPlayboy. He lives in Los Angeles.
