MICROCOSMS OF HISTORY: A READING & CONVERSATION WITH FOUR DEBUT POETS

Fire Index: Poems by BETHANY BREITLAND measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion, reckoning with her complicit, and often dishonest life to demand her full attention, forgiveness, and responsibility. Drawing its title from the 1863 federal act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Removal Acts: Poems by ERIN MARIE LYNCH reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence, assembling an intimate record of recovery from bulimia and insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. Octobers by SAHAR MURADI traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years. And LESLIE SAINZ’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience, anatomizing the unique grief of immigrant daughters. Moderated by SOLEIL GARNEAU, MBF Emerging Writer Fellow in poetry.

Buy Fire Index: Poems. – Breitland

Buy Removal Acts: Poems. – Lynch

Buy Octobers. – Muradi

Buy Have You Been Long Enough at Table. – Sainz