Wave Books and City Lights present
Dara Barrois/Dixon, Laynie Browne, and Renee Gladman
reading from new work published by Wave Books
Dara Barrois/Dixon reads from Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina Purchase Here
Laynie Browne reads from Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists Purchase Here
Renee Gladman reads from Plans for Sentences Purchase Here
About Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina:
With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (formerly Dara Wier) poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Barrois/Dixon brings profound attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and to the stories that shape our worlds. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express “love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage.”
About Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists:
Laynie Browne’s latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language, and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation. Browne’s exquisite collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.
About Plans for Sentences:
“These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.
About the authors
Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and forthcoming in 2022, Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit,, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.
Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor.She is author of fourteen collections of poems and four books of fiction. Recent publications include a book of poems, In Garments Worn by Lindens; a novel, Periodic Companions; and a book of short fiction, The Book of Moments. Her work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, and in anthologies including The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, UK), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton). Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Catalan. She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2013) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat, 2020). Honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox (Wave Books, 2007), and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia, 2005). She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as two collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper’s, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others, and is the recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell prize in fiction. For more information, visit reneegladman.com
This event has been made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation