Join debut poets Ashia Ajani (author of Heirloom), Caitlin Cowan (author of Happy Everything), Sebastian Merrill (author of GHOST :: SEEDS), and Sahar Muradi (author of OCTOBERS), as they read from their first collections and share about the processing of making a first full-length poetry book. Light refreshments will be served.
About the books:
OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author's life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where "echoes are inevitable." Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language - as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of "home" and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
Happy Everything is a postnuptial ghost story that Diane Seuss has described as “necessary, witty, painful, and brilliantly made.” This domestic elegy is not a book about bad men or a bad marriage: it’s a book about the ways in which women are asked to facilitate pleasure, be beautiful, and participate in capitalism as joy. The speaker of these poems lets her husband win at Jeopardy. She smashes her wedding china in the street. The speaker keeps celebrating her birthday but nothing ever changes. She’s sometimes Jeannie of I Dream of Jeannie, fantasizing about shattering her pink bottle. She sees herself as part of an ancestral tradition of making oneself smaller to accommodate men. These poems are a collage of the traditions of a past that women are continually attempting to escape.
Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a transmasculine speaker and a figure that he conceptualizes as his ghost, the girl-ghost of the self that he left behind to become the person he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from an underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. The ocean serves as a throughline connecting the speaker and his lost self, providing a setting in which everything is continually in flux: the cycle of the tides, the pounding surf against the rocky coast, and the ever-present threat of pollution and climate change. Kayaking through a coastline studded with islands, alongside seals, porpoises, and herons, amid swirls of floating plastic, we are invited into a world in which the only constant is change. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.
Heirloom explores concepts of spiritual nourishment, physical and emotional sacrifice, environmental injustice, sexuality, waste colonialism, abolition, and Black migration; these poems seek to address the trauma felt from environmental injustice and the familial wounds that are passed down as a result of historical neglect. A descendant of W.E.B DuBois’s concept of “sorrow songs,” Heirloom analyzes our environmental pasts and presents in order to inform our environmental future. Through bird song, jazz, symbiosis, land loss, insect interactions, travel, desire and a whole lot of love and reverence for the unspoken, Heirloom reveals the ingrained connections between Blackness and ecological survival.
About the authors:
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower, a glass bead, a carnivorous plant, an overripe nectarine hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe peoples, now living in the Bay Area (unceded Ohlone land). Ajani is a lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate resilient schools educator with Mycelium Youth Network. In the literary world, Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Ajani’s writing is a kaleidoscope of their work as an eco-griot and abolitionist. She is the author of Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023). Read more of their work at ashiaajani.com.
Caitlin Cowan is the author of Happy Everything (Cornerstone Press, 2024). She has taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Caitlin works in arts nonprofit administration for Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, where she serves as Director of International Programs and as Chair of Creative Writing. Caitlin also serves as Poetry Co-Editor at Pleiades and writes PopPoetry, a weekly poetry and pop culture newsletter. lives on Michigan’s west coast with her husband, their young daughter, and two mischievous cats. Find her at caitlincowan.com.
Sebastian Merrill’s debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, published by Texas Review Press in November 2023. GHOST :: SEEDS was recently named an honor book in the 2024 Stonewall Book Award - Barbara Gittings Literature Award and was selected by Ellen Dore Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize for Poetry from Friends of Writers. Sebastian served as a staff-scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2022 and 2023 and was selected as the Summer 2023 Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Residency Fellow. The recipient of the Rodney Jack Scholarship from Friends of Writers, he holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Wellesley College.
Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbooks [ G A T E S ], Ask Hafiz, and A Garden Beyond My Hand, and co-editor, with Seelai Karzai, of EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora. Her writing has been supported by Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bethany Arts Community, Blue Mountain Center, Kundiman, and Sustainable Arts Foundation. Sahar lives in New York City, where she directs the arts education programs at City Lore and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot. saharmuradi.com