Please join us in welcoming two critically acclaimed poets to read from and sign copies of their newest books.ELIZABETH ARNOLD is the author of six books of poems, including Skeleton Coast (Flood Editions, 2017) and Wave House (Flood Editions, 2023). The recipient of a Whiting Award and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, Arnold teaches poetry at the University of Maryland.
"Elizabeth Arnold's poems are structures for our times: built to move and to hold. Within them surge the elemental forces, the earth's deep patterns and the human-driven, breakneck hurts--and the poet's own migratory mind, coming honestly to terms with her restless and embattled life. In WAVE HOUSE, her sixth book, she emerges as one of our great American contemporaries. Niedecker, Oppen, and Pound are Arnold's forebears, though she sloughs away nativist habits, 'unhindered by belief, / utterly available.' If, within the far-flung geographies visited by her poems, you are often reminded of her birth-state, Florida, that is not because her goal is return. Elegy belongs to the Wanderer's exile, as spoken in her thrilling translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Arnold's aim is to be here: 'in the open-air room / at the top of the house // where I've been working, ' to 'see more sharply' into the movements of species beside her. So she brings that life to the reader, thriving in the vital moment of each poem."--Jenny Mueller
PATRICK MORRISSEY is the author of three books of poetry: The Differences (Pressed Wafer, 2014), World Music (Verge, 2017), and Light Box (Verge, 2023). From 2014 to 2016, he was the poetry editor of Chicago Review. He teaches at the University of Chicago.
In Light Box, Patrick Morrissey's third collection, the poet explores the mysteries and intimacies of life in the city as they intersect with the pleasures and realities of family life. In lines of lyric concision, Morrissey observes miniature dramas play out in apartments, on sidewalks, and behind the wheel. Emotionally vivid and intellectually complex, these carefully measured poems transform the most familiar things into marvels, where "a filigree of shadows tossed on the wind reassembles itself.
Copies of the authors' books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Subterranean Books.
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