City Lights and Wave Books present
Lisa Jarnot and Chris Nealon reading from new work
Lisa Jarnot celebrates the publication of Four Lectures published by Wave Books
Chris Nealon celebrates the publication of All About You also published by Wave Books
About Four Lectures:
Four Lectures by Lisa Jarnot is the seventh book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, comprising autobiographical essays that form an intimate, uncompromising, and generous glimpse into a remarkable life in poetry.
Across the lectures, or talks, given between October of 2020 and December of 2021, Jarnot examines what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, to have white privilege, and to write poetry. With colloquial ease and wit, Jarnot investigates the generative tensions at the intersections of traditional and experimental forms, develops relationships between ‘deep gossip’ and ecstatic connectedness, and considers the prophetic tradition in American poetry as inflected through counter-cultural spirituality. Ultimately, Jarnot presents poetry as a calling, asking us to consider the means by which poets can envision a new heaven and a new earth.
About All About You
Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon’s fifth book of poetry, All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it.
“You almost let your ego go,” he writes, “but oh—/maybe tomorrow.” Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet’s address shifts in these poems from “I” to “you” and back again, inviting his audience to shift along with him. Out of that agility, All About You builds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic “we”: “imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh – full of chatter – / Hush now / Come on, let’s run – ”
Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, NY and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission (1996), Ring of Fire (2001), Black Dog Songs (2003), Night Scenes (2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (2013) and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (2019). She co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (1997), and her biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, was published by the University of California Press in 2012. She has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, holds a Masters of Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary, is a PhD student in theology at Drew University, and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.
Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation