Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political […]
Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted onto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from the […]
In this quietly mesmerizing novel, no one, including the protagonist, is ever entirely sure of their motivations. Existing in the liminal spaces between altruism and greed, This Room Is Made of Noise deftly explores the shades of gray that lie between our desires and our demons. “Everything you want in a novel: exquisitely imagined, big-hearted, […]
Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women’s bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam, beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes—lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of […]
What makes a powerful sentence? How do you write sentences that worm their way into the ear and propel the reader forward? In this workshop, we'll analyze the anatomy of compelling sentences by looking at a range of authors, including Christine Schutt, Michael Ondaatje, and Jamaica Kincaid. You will have time and opportunity to practice […]
Respond imaginatively to a prompt in any genre, then put your inspiration into print. In this workshop at the Riso Club, housed in Rochester’s Visual Studies Workshop, Writers & Books’ instructors will present a short piece of published writing, facilitate a brief discussion, and provide a related prompt. Along with your fellow workshop participants, you’ll […]
Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors […]
