New Elegies at the Mass Poetry Festival 2021

Excited to be reading alongside Erin Carlyle, Sumita Chakraborty, and Rebecca Morgan Frank for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Our reading, New Elegies, is scheduled for Friday, May 14th, at 12:30 PM EST. Register at festival.masspoetry.org. 

About New Elegies: "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."

Mass Poetry Festival Flyer