3:00 pm - Book Launch and Celebration with Rae Armantrout and Heller Levinson

Join us for a celebration of poetry with a dual book launch for Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Conjure (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) and Heller Levinson’s recently released Seep (Black Widow Press, 2020).

For more details about or to order their books please:  https://www.splitrockbks.com/event/desmond-fish-library-book-launch-rae-armantrout-and-heller-levinson

RAE ARMANTROUT is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fifteen books of poetry. She has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In her new book Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world: the Amazon smolders, children are caged or die crossing rivers and oceans, and weddings make convenient targets for drone strikes. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self and ask us to look with new eyes at what we’re doing.

“In this volume, Armantrout addresses topics familiar from her earlier work: the nature of consciousness, aging, the looming ecological crisis, the vacuousness of much of what passes for public discourse.”―Stride Magazine

“Unsettling, slippery intimations move just below the surface of Rae Armantrout’s enigmatic and unforgettable new collection of poems. For the record, Rae Armantrout is my favourite living poet.”―Nick Cave

Rae Armantrout has published ten books with Wesleyan University Press, including Wobble, Entanglements, Partly, and Versed. She lives in Everett, Washington.

About HELLER LEVINSON. Allison Ross wrote: his “philosophy of poetics is “accessibly elusive.” Or is that “elusively accessible”? Either way, this paradox encapsulates Heller’s approach, which on the surface seems overly cerebral but in actuality is intuitively ascertainable. His is a paragon of experimental verse, aloof and excessively premised on the tenets of logos … and yet, at its core, his Hinge Theory and the execution thereof (via his verse) have a playful pathos… there is a palpable sense of fierce ebullience, of good old fashioned frenzied FUN.”

Levinson’s new book, Seep, (Black Widow Press, 2020) will not disappoint. It is “averse to blockages, the automatic, the preconditioned, and the stale.”

Levinson’s previous titles include Wrack Lariat, from stone this running, Smelling Mary, and ToxiCity, as well as chapbooks, collaborations, and a novel. His most recent collaboration is Dialogics, a series of exchanges with Will Alexander. His upcoming LURK is scheduled for a Spring 2021 release from Black Widow Press. The originator of Hinge Theory, Levinson lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

To Join the Crowdcast event please REGISTER HERE