Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and hosted by poet Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Saddiq Dzukogi, Jen Karetnick, and Michael Hettich.
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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.
Saddiq Dzukogi’s poetry collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press 2021) was named one of 29 of the best poetry collections by Oprah Daily. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Prairie Schooner, and other literary journals and magazines. He is a finalist of Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships and Grants from Nebraska Arts Council, Pen America, Obsidian Foundation, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he is a Ph.D. student and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Prairie Schooner.
In Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla the loss of his daughter becomes the navigational pull to an interiority steeped in earthly grief and a desire for the unseen spaces of the afterlife. With incredible fidelity, Dzukogi unravels a series of poems that wrestle with his loss and make meaning of our most unbearable moments. His is a song of embodied witness and recollection shaped by a voice skilled in the musicality of duality. These are poems that find their way to the reader’s depth and open a window to the otherworld.
Jen Karetnick’s fourth full-length book of poems is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020), an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist and a Kops-Fetherling Honorable Mention. She is also the author of Hunger Until It’s Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023) in addition to six other collections. Karetnick has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Based in Miami, she works as a lifestyle journalist and is the author of four cookbooks, four guidebooks, and more. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com
What I love about Jen Karetnick’s poems, and particularly the poems in this book, is that each one has its own keen mind. As readers, we experience this mind witnessing, conversing, debating and reckoning with the world, or not. These poems are vital for the soul the way lungs are vital for the breath. /Ms. Karetnick has a fascinating self. She can speak Modernese–cite Snapchat and Facebook, even use an emoji–without coming off as trying to be hip. By the same token, you don’t question the scientific terms she uses from time to time because she’s convinced you they’re the perfect choices. If that were all, I’d admire her brilliance and stop there. But it isn’t all, because she’s also emotionally honest.
Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with his family. His books of poetry include The Mica Mine (St. Andrews University Press, 2021), winner of The Lena Shull Book Award; To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019); Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Press, 2018); The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017); Systems of Vanishing (University of Tampa, 2014); The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers, 2011) and Like Happiness (Anhinga, 2010). His work has appeared widely in such journals as Ploughshares, Orion, The Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Witness, and Poetry East. In addition to the Lena Shull Prize, his awards include three Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He has served on the board of several organizations, including AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and WAIL (Word and Image Lab). Hettich holds a Ph.D. in literature and taught at the college level for many years. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers. Read more: michaelhettich.com
In this stunningly intuitive and elemental collection, Hettich celebrates the unspoken dialogues of the natural world with linguistic dexterity and fierce transformative details. We return to ourselves in caves, with marrow and fur; to the primordial animal that resides within us; to our ancestors in the elements, reminding us of our brief and earthly inheritance. Lyrical, ruminative, awe-inspiring. /Michael Hettich’s poems resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes. Wisdom and enchantment are calling cards…
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