Event

Please join us to celebrate the publication of the anthology, A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's novel, edited by Laynie Browne, with contributors Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Julia Bloch, Marcella Durand, John Keene, Jena Osman and Brandon Shimoda. Does such a form as a poet's novel exist? Participants will present their thoughts on the prose of Etel Adnan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Thalia Field, Fernando Pessoa and Gertrude Stein. Katya Buresh writes of this collection in Full Stop, "A Forest on Many Stems" successfully captures the craft and intent that went into a kaleidoscope of poet's novels, each of them unique yet united by their author's desire to create a new space within narrative for their words and, in some cases, their existence."

From 1986-2012, she wrote her long poem Drafts; beginning in 2015, her Traces, with Days is in process; RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS has just completed a book-length critical study called A Long Essay on the Long Poem (Alabama, forthcoming). Forthcoming also is her Selected Poems, 1980-2020 from CHAX.

JULIA BLOCH grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. Her most recent book of poetry is The Sacramento of Desire. She is the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and she directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

MARCELLA DURAND is the author of To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020;Area, Belladonna* Books, 2008; and Traffic & Weather, Futurepoem, 2008. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Earth's Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020.

JOHN KEENE is the author, co-author & translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021) and the fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2016). His awards include a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He teaches and serves as a department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

JENA OSMAN's most recent book of poems is Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Other books include Corporate Relations(Burning Deck, 2014), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She co-founded and co-edited Chain magazine with Juliana Spahr. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia.

BRANDON SHIMODA is a yonsei poet/writer, and the author most recently of The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018). He co-edited, with Thom Donovan, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). His book on the afterlife f Japanese American incarceration received a Creative Nonfiction grant from the Whiting Foundation, and is forthcoming from City Lights.