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Friday, May 14 • 12:30pm - 1:30pm
New Elegies

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How do we turn grief into song? Four poets read from new collections that wrestle with the bounds and opportunities of the American elegy. A father’s illness and loss are relived through lyrics that draw vividly from the everyday landscapes of the kitchen, the hospital, and the surrounding Florida that a family of Cuban exiles calls home in Jessica Guzman’s Adelante. Sumita Chakraborty’s Arrow uses the long poem as a means for making meaning out of mourning for the premature death of her sister. An elegiac landscape of poor women and girls of the South is built across Erin Carlyle’s Southern-Gothic-infused Magnolia Canopy Underworld, as she excavates the forgotten and lost in the world of trailer parks and pain clinics, while Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints! explores mortality through the figure of the automaton in the wake of her mother’s death.

Link to recording: https://salemstate.zoom.us/rec/share/zf95D8krWMr5T2tq5XP-E3IoiFS03dkc6jPIm2JArXJfS3ZNE-kF-_6gatMeZ_Jf.R-k-ACH06oL6YcNb

Speakers
avatar for Sumita Chakraborty

Sumita Chakraborty

Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar who teaches at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is the author of Arrow (Alice James Books/Carcanet Press, 2020), which has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. Find her at sumitachakraborty.co... Read More →
avatar for Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank's fourth collection of poems is, Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches in Northwestern University’s MFA Program in Prose... Read More →
avatar for Erin Carlyle

Erin Carlyle

Erin Carlyle's poetry can be found in journals such as New South, Bateau Press, and Prairie Schooner. She holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University, and her debut full-length collection, Magnolia Canopy Otherworld, is out now on Driftwood Press.
avatar for Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Ecotone, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and... Read More →


Friday May 14, 2021 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
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