Linda Nemec Foster
The Blue Divide
New Issues Press, 2021
$16.00
Playlist:
I'll be reading from my new poetry book, The Blue Divide, which one reviewer described as a collection that “navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond--through currents of art, love, war, dreams, history, language, family--to map what flows between us." It pays close attention to what can heal and redeem our common journey-- “...pointing out the places where the heart breaks, and where it mends." Specifically, I'll read from a sequence of ekphrastic poems, "The Artist's Notebook," that was the first runner-up in New Letters' Poetry Award and was subsequently published in New Millennium Writings.
jae kim
Translator
Cold Candies: Selected Poems of Lee Young-Ju
Black Ocean, 2021
$16.00
Playlist:
“Mooncoming”
“The Ritual to Come of Age”
“Nine Steps”
Jenny Qi
Focal Point
Steel Toe Books, 2021
$16.00
Playlist:
Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist’s unofficial dissertation, a daughter’s faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death, the collection turns to “all the rituals of all the faiths,” invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief.
Poems read:
“Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge” “Biology Lesson 1”
“Biology Lesson 2”
“Penelope Looks Back” “Contingencies”