Virtual Reading: Nate Klug and Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Join us on Thursday, November 5 at 5pm when Nate Klug and Fiona Sze-Lorrain read from their new collections, Hosts and Guests and Rain in Plural, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83679639869

Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,83679639869#  or +13462487799,,83679639869#
Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
US: +1 669 900 9128  or +1 346 248 7799  or +1 253 215 8782  or +1 312 626 6799  or +1 646 558 8656  or +1 301 715 8592
Webinar ID: 836 7963 9869
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kmEIyss6Y

Praise for Hosts and Guests

“Nate Klug’s Hosts and Guests is a fine book full of rich nuance, complex emotions, and sharp observations. These are poems replete with hosts and guests from a wide range of ecosystems in which Horace, Rihanna, Leviticus, Dickinson, and even Pikachu and Pokémon Go make smooth appearances. Hosts and Guests is a book that feels as though, in Klug’s own words, ‘day’s first words // arrive like nets, flung / from somewhere behind // our heads.’ These are beautifully crafted, contemplative poems that stay with you long after you’ve read them.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Living Weapon: Poems

“What’s the secret of these fresh and mysterious poems? In their lightness of touch, clarity, probity, and almost Japanese spareness, they bathe the ordinary in otherworldly light. Cicadas, young parents, a baby, North American bars and highways, jellyfish, a Horatian ode, the death of Pompey, religious faith feeling its way, an inchworm shrinking from em dash to hyphen—all find their places, revealed, in Nate Klug’s delicately paced syntax and gracious reticence. A book both timely and ageless, a balm, a boon.”—Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems

About Hosts and Guests

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as “a seduction by way of small astonishments”

Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the “immiserated quiet” of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, “The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables.”

About Rain in Plural

The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as a master of musicality and enlightening allusions. In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls creating between liberties. With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn. Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl–each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.