It’s STILL National Poetry Month!
It’s time to celebrate a few local poets.
On Friday, April 13th there will be a Book Launch Celebration
featuring three Denver University poetry students.
Diana Khoi Ngyen will read from Ghost of;
Jennifer Elise Foerster will read from Bright Raft in the Afterweather;
Alicia Mountain will read from High Ground Coward.
Event info:
Starts at 7pm at Counterpath
(7935 East 14th Avenue, Denver)
All poetry collections will be available for purchase!
About Diana:
“Born in Los Angeles, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. A winner of the 92Y’s Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.” —Omnidawn
About Ghost Of:
WINNER OF THE OMNIDAWN 2016/17 OPEN POETRY BOOK PRIZE
SELECTED BY TERRANCE HAYES
“Ghost of is truly a brilliant book. Amazing poetry happens inside visual innovations where “There is nothing that is not music, the pouring of water from one receptacle into another a coat of bees draped over the sack of sugar caving in on itself.” Poetry is found in the gaps, silences and ruptures of history. In “An Empty House Is a Debt” the poet writes: “There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.” These poems mean to make a song of emptiness and the spaces we house. They sing to and for the ghosts of identity, exile, and history. They sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door. Lyric fills in the holes in the story. Ghost Of is unforgettable.” –Terrance Hayes
About Jennifer:
“Jennifer Elise Foerster is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, received her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Foerster is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster is the author of one previous book of poems, Leaving Tulsa.” —UA Press
About Bright Raft in the Afterweather:
“Featuring recurring characters, settings, and motifs from her previous book, Leaving Tulsa, Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds.
Foerster’s captivating language and evocative imagery immerse the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster’s refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance.” — UA Press
About Alicia:
“ALICIA MOUNTAIN’s first collection, High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press, 2018), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the digital chapbook Thin Fire, selected by Natalie Diaz and published by BOAAT Press. Mountain’s poems can be found in Guernica, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Idyllwild Arts Fellow and a resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a queer poet, PhD student, and assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Mountain earned her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. ” —Alicia Mountain Website
About High Ground Coward:
2017/2018 IOWA POETRY PRIZE WINNER
“Alicia Mountain’s urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow. High Ground Coward offers fists full of soil, leftovers for breakfast, road trip as ritual, twins of lovers and twins of ourselves. This world blooms with hunger-inducing detail, its speakers asking us to consider what it will take to satisfy our own appetites while simultaneously trying to nourish one another. “Ferocious, even the softest part,” Mountain shows us “a way to fall in love with wanting,” leaving us “ravenous, but gradually.” —Amazon
These collections will be available for purchase at the event!
If you can’t make this event, be sure to check out next week’s article for more ideas on how to celebrate.
