Book Launch Tonight at Book Culture

Join us tonight, Monday, April 11th at 7pm, for a celebration of Poets Out Loud 2015-2016 winners, Nancy Pearson and Gregory Mahrer at Book Culture on 450 Columbus Ave. The poets will read from their winning collections: Pearson's The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone and Mahrer's A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent. They will be joined by POL Prize judge, John Yau.

The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone: In this her second collection of poetry, Nancy K. Pearson explores the possibilities of recovery and transformation in a world where “words cease to matter.” The speaker attempts to reconcile the past— a past shadowed by depression, addiction and misdiagnosis. Pearson refuses to end in a place of relief, asking the question, “don’t we all /fall into aggregate darkness/for something?” Instead her poems meditate on the lyric of absence and fragmentation. Pearson’s poems are restless, unsettling and revelatory. Here is Michael Klein on the new book: "So wondrous and happily strange that I had to take breaks in my reading of it to make sure that everything I thought I knew was still the way I remembered it. This is, in the best way, a book about what it means to be surprised."

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent: charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, "between / what is occluded and what has elapsed," that Gregory Mahrer's ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys. In the book's forward, John Yau writes: "Gregory Mahrer, who listens carefully to the voices inside him, and does not reject the reports they bring him, full of terrifying and beautiful music, wrote this wise and beautiful book. We would be remiss not to listen to what he has come to tell us."

Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. 

This is the first off-site book launch for Poets Out Loud. Wine will be served.

450 Columbus Ave

New York, NY 10024

7 pm, Monday, April 11