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Ann Arbor, MI 48104
USA
We are thrilled to welcome three wonderful poets to Literati as part of our Poetry at Literati series! Donald Dunbar, Christine Hume, and Becky Winn will be reading poems for their latest collections.
About Safe Word:
Safe Word, Donald Dunbar’s second collection of poetry, acts as a tonic against spiritual death. This book is the kompromat of the undersoul, the blotter paper in the plea deal, a crystal jutting out of the center of an otherwise-innocent forehead. Dunbar chops, screws, solders, and sutures forms of thought and feeling into abominations you might just fall in love with, and be consumed by. Never be bored again.
About Shot:
In alternating currents of prose and verse, SHOT reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. SHOT inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, SHOT creates torque that drives beyond material experience.
Donald Dunbar lives in Portland, OR, and is the author of SAFE WORD and EYELID LICK, winner of the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series prize, as well as a number of chapbooks. In 2016 he co-founded Eyedrop, a virtual reality design studio. He has helped run If Not For Kidnap: a PDX Poetry Concern, The Poetry Data Project, and has contributed to a number of other worthy projects.
Christine Hume is the author of Shot (Counterpath Press, 2010); Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; and Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She currently serves as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she also lives. Her latest collection of poetry is entitled Questions Like a Face.
Becky Winn is a poet and designer living in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor for Gramma Poetry and the founder of ĐIỆN, an artist collective and clothing brand.
