112th: Appalachians Run Amok with Adrian Blevins

Event date: 
03/28/2018 - 7:00pm

On Wednesday, March 28th at 7pm, join us at Book Culture on 112th for a poetry reading celebrating Adrian Blevins's new collection Appalachians Run Amok. Adrian will be joined by Cate Marvin, Mark WunderlichMontana Ray, and Corey Page Spencer.

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“Adrian Blevins’ Appalachians Run Amok tells mountain secrets, but not theones you’d think. Comical, frank, worried but not worried about it, and always in trouble, they roar up out of the gorge in swimsuits they like, letter jackets,and a fast kind of poem that can hang onto anything, including babies smallas ‘two empty toilet paper tubes you glue together into a bazooka to blow at the cosmos through.’ This book is smart and wise and also lots of fun,” writes poet Lisa Lewis.

Blevins who is known for her wit, humor, and precise skill with the poetic line, has created a collection of poems that reminds us of the power of poetry. Pulitzer Prize Finalist Diane Seuss writes, “What did Dickinson say? That she knew it was poetry if she felt as if the top of her head was taken off? If that’s the standard, then hell yes this is poetry, and this is poetry that has lopped off my whole head and jammed me back into where and who I’m from.”


​Adrian Blevins is the author of Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and a co-edited collection of essays, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among many others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize.  Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Marvin is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.  A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, her third book of poems, Oracle, was released from W.W. Norton & Co. in March 2015. She is currently a Visiting Professor in creative writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Mark Wunderlich's first book, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. A third volume of poems titled The Earth Avails, was published in 2014 and received the 2015 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas.  Wunderlich lives in New York’s Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont where he also serves as a member of the core faculty in the Graduate Writing Seminars.

Montana Ray is a Columbia University phd candidate in comparative literature writing her dissertation on translation as performance; she is also the mom of Amadeus. Ray is the author of the concrete poem collection (guns & butter), available from Argos Books, who also published her translations of Francisca Aguirre, The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s. Ray is currently translating, Loco AfĂĄn (Crazy Desire), a collection of chronicles by Pedro Lemebel about las locas, sex workers and performance artists living in Santiago during the AIDS epidemic. 

Corey Page Spencer was born and raised in a small town in South Carolina,  He has  BA in Literature from New York University and an MFA from Columbia University. He has published in a few online journals and is currently at work on a longer poetry project and a memoir about the suicides of his grandfather and two uncles. His wife is due to have their first child on April 1st!

 

Event address: 
536 W 112th St
New York, NY 10025
Appalachians Run Amok By Adrian Blevins Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780998631455
Availability: Not In Stock - Usually ships in 3-5 Days
Published: Two Sylvias Press - January 15th, 2018

(guns & Butter) By Montana Ray Cover Image
$16.50
Not Available
ISBN: 9781938247163
Published: Argos Books - May 15th, 2015

Oracle: Poems By Cate Marvin Cover Image
$16.95
Not Available
ISBN: 9780393353136
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - July 12th, 2016

The Earth Avails: Poems By Mark Wunderlich Cover Image
$16.00
Not Available
ISBN: 9781555976668
Published: Graywolf Press - February 4th, 2014