Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and hosted by poet Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Poetrio: Crystal Stone, Sally Rosen Kindred, and Rick Mulkey.
Click here to RSVP. On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. Thank you!
Crystal Stone is the author of four collections of poetry Knock-Off Monarch (Dawn Valley 2018), All the Places I Wish I Died (CLASH 2021), Gym Bras (Really Serious Literature 2021), and Civic Duty (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press 2022). Her work has appeared in many international journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Writers Resist, Southword Journal Online, and many others. She received her MFA from Iowa State University in 2020 and gave a TEDx talk entitled “The Transformative Power of Poetry” in 2018. In her free time, she likes to cook and roller skate. Find more of her poems at her website www.crystalbstone.com.
In her stunning collection, All the Places I Wish I Died, Crystal Stone admits, “I write / poems about something I can’t touch” before making the intangible-love, desire, loss-tangible. This book invites us to explore the depths of its speaker’s past experiences-each poem becomes an exercise in l’esprit de l’escalier-only here, revisiting the past alters the present. And through this altering, Stone reveals a new kind of lonely–one where you lose yourself through your re/encounters with others-“After so much time touching other things, / my hands stopped tasting like me.” Read All the Places I Wish I Died and pay close attention to the poems that leave their own taste in your mouth.
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Sally Rosen Kindred’s third poetry collection is Where the Wolf, winter of the 2020 Diode Book Prize, just out from Diode Editions. She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, and three chapbooks. Her poems have received two awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. Born and raised in North Carolina, she lives in Maryland, where she teaches online for Johns Hopkins CTY and The Poetry Barn. Read more: http://www.sallyrosenkindred.com
“In Where the Wolf, Sally Rosen Kindred makes and remakes the world with language that’s both savage and tender, a world in which words and their mysteries give us passageways to a second world: that of myth and memory, unseen but not separate from our own. Always there is the specter of grief haunting the edge of the scene. Always the inevitable losses—past selves, the children who are nearly grown now, a mother adrift in dementia. ‘I know now I was something held,’ writes Kindred, and we feel both the care and the hindrance of that embrace in a woman’s life as she navigates middle age. Perhaps most of all, Where the Wolf is a searing elegy for daughterhood, and although we know how this ends every time, still some things hold true despite the losses: ‘I wake hard, a daughter. I break back into my skin.’”
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Rick Mulkey is the author of six poetry collections, including All These Hungers, Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of periodicals such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review, and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, and been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has received a Hawthornden Fellowship and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Award, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from Southeast Review. Mulkey is director and co-founder of the Converse Low Residency MFA.
“In ALL THESE HUNGERS, Rick Mulkey reminds us “how memory opens / on the tongue and nose” through rich poems that catalog and name the pleasures and pains of consuming. Whether it’s the best damn bacon on the east coast or the unique artificiality of Velveeta cheese, these hungers are legion, glorious, and unclean, and not simply limited to human consumption: the “Rite Aid store / boarded and smothered in kudzu” and the oleander that “refuses / to be tamed, refuses to hide in shadow” illustrate this shared truth: what better way to celebrate this brief existence than by taking in everything we possibly can before it’s over? “How quickly the world comes to terms with endings, / flies already swarming the table scraps.” There’s no time to waste. Let’s eat.”
Event date:
Sunday, August 1, 2021 – 3:00pm
Event address:
Virtual event
All the Places I Wish I Died (Paperback)
Where the Wolf (Paperback)
All These Hungers (Paperback)
By Rick Mulkey
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