July Westhale reading from Via Negativa

Join July Westhale for a free, virtual reading of her most recent book, Via Negativa on Friday, July 17, and 7:30 pm.

July Westhale is an essayist, translator,and the award-winning author of five collections of poetry: Trailer Trash, Occasionally Accurate Science, The Cavalcade, Quantifiable Data, and, most recently, Via Negativa. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine.

Via Negativa is a book about the more difficult, but truer, ways of talking about the ecstatic world. Half grappling with divinity and the many manifestations of gender/the self, and half an ars poetica, Via Negativa is a gorgeous holy dunking, a submersion into a rich field of lyricism and emotion,a mikva that yearns to leave the reader clear-eyed and bright. Diving into verbal lostness, the hatred of poetry, mythology, and the epistemology of identity, this book challenges the tripartite notion of holiness and its relationship to poetic duty.

“July Westhale is a shapeshifting poet of desire and violence, grief and forgiveness, trauma and loss transformed by resilience.After her gorgeous debut Trailer Trash explored the intricacies of class and gender, Via Negativa deftly weaves the sensual with the spiritual, reckoning with a religious inheritance and a powerful faith in pleasure, engaging in bold lyric conversation with the divine.” —Diana Whitney