In-Store Event: Poetry Reading with Teresa K. Miller (Borderline Fortune) and Abraham Smith (Destruction of Man)
We're delighted to announce an in-store poetry reading with Teresa K. Miller (author of Borderline Fortune) and Abraham Smith (author of Destruction of Man) on Tuesday, November 9th at 7 PM. We hope to see you there!
About Borderline Fortune
Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance—of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular—set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one’s ancestors’ grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather’s experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father’s untimely death, as well as her pursuit of regenerative horticulture, Miller seeks through these beautifully crafted poems to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention.
About Teresa K. Miller
A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.
About Destruction of Man
Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn’t work: this won’t either: yet Destruction of Man is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar county–stung body; stung land–as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what’s left, and the hawk ate what’s left, and then the hawk died of old age. This is a book-length poem about small-scale family farming in the midst of the “get-big-or-get-out” mantra and foghorn. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrude Stein: “After all anybody is as their land and air is.”
About Abraham Smith
Abraham Smith is the author of numerous poetry collections—most recently, the chapbook Bear Lite Inn (New Michigan Press, 2020), the full-length Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018), and the forthcoming Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2021). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns; their debut record Break Your Heart was released on Dial Back Sound in Fall 2020: thesnarlinyarnsut.bandcamp.com. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State.
A collection that explores inherited trauma on an individual and communal level, from a National Poetry Series–winning poet who “refus[es] the mind’s limits” (Carol Muske-Dukes)
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Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told through colloquialism and a minding of song.