In celebration of National Poetry Month, three poets read from their award-winning collections.
About the Books:
cue by Masannat – With cue, Jordanian poet Masannat (whose debut collection, 50 WATER DREAMS, was the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition) considers the cultural nuances of the private-versus-public paradox, with poems that wrestle with intimacy and distance. Departing from love as a force of creation, cue’s intertextual experiments and lyric poems map environmental relations and pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency.

ASTERISM by Lee – This book contemplates the wonders and challenges of transnational, polycentric living. Moving between South Korea, Peru, and the United States, the poems in the collection find luminous homes at the interstices of bridges, flight layovers, languages, desires, imperfect memories, and mutable mouths. They blur the line between self and other: words are translated into connotations, self-portraits become co-inhabited identities with family, friends, foods, and cultural histories.

YOU BURY THE BIRDS IN MY PELVIS by Weber – Winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang, the collection features poems in a range of forms that consider the queer body, chronic illness, and love amid rural plains landscapes. Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways, YOU BURY THE BIRDS IN MY PELVIS is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love.
queerness.