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Gillian Conoley and Donna de la Perrière
October 22, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
reading from new poetry
A Little More Red Sun On The Human: New and Selected Poems
by Gillian Conoley
published by Nightboat Books
and
Works of Love & Terror
by Donna de la Perrière
published by Talisman House
About A Little More Red Sun On The Human: New and Selected Poems:
Gillian Conoley’s selected poems assemble a shockingly varied body of work, comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms. Her coruscating vibrant poems are informed by visual art and film, political engagement and playful linguistic constructions.
A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems forms a completely new trajectory through decades of poetic work, including three collections previously out of print. In a career that began by chronicling the idiosyncrasies of Texas girlhood, Conoley’s work spirals outward toward an inquiry into spirit and matter, the relation between the individual and the state. Throughout, one can trace Conoley’s obsessions and concerns: democracy, metaphysics, motherhood, gender and race, futurity and history. Conoley’s new work posits an inquiry into the coming shifts of human consciousness and perception as she imagines the next world––flush with artificial intelligence, an ever-arriving, shape-shifting technology––and the possible communities we may yet forge between human life and a compromised planet.
Praise for Gillian Conoley
“Conoley’s poems have a singular energy like an organ solo or a shotgun resorting to storytelling. She adds tool handles to our histories; a set list for our waking souls. And an instrument of self-reflection that a landscape might ponder itself with. On her page, our natures get away with nothing. All cradled by a ruthlessly loving dance of language; in her poems we meet our twins.” ––Tongo Eisen-Martin
“Nimble, inquisitive and intelligently elegant, the poems in this much anticipated volume reorient phenomena to make meaning with it: personal, inviting, knowing, and necessary. The range of Gillian Conoley’s attention is a marvel.”––Hoa Nguyen
“Here we find the peculiarly American matter-of-factness of the small town exotic coming face-to-face with intellectual high-brow energy. Carson McCullers meets Gertrude Stein. Perhaps Jane Bowles is an appropriate comparison.”––The Antioch Review
“Masterfully composed in the hot spaces and so rhythmic sounds Americans have put to their times. ‘Like gold into scar/ a twister in the skull.’”––Alice Notley
About Donna de la Perrière
Donna de la Perrière is the author of SAINT ERASURE (2010) and TRUE CRIME (2009), both from Talisman House. The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series.