Description
Join us for a reading and conversation between two exceptional poets: Yanyi and Victoria Chang. We will also celebrate their respective, much-anticipated new releases Dream of the Divided Field and The Trees Witness Everything!
Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender and ethereal poems,the book examines a body breaking down, and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. His last poetry collection, The Year of Blue Water, won the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading.
In Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. Her last poetry book OBIT was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a Core Faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program.
This program is part of our AAPI Heritage Month Programming and supported by The Cambridge Public Library Foundation.
Registration is required.
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