- This event has passed.
Mike Lala, D.A. Powell + Jacques Rancourt
July 21, 2017 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm UTC+0
Mike Lala, D.A. Powell and Jacques Rancourt read from their latest poetry collections.
About Exit Theater
Winner of the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Exit Theater casts classical elegy, with dazzling formal innovation, into a staggering work of contemporary, political polyphony. Through monologues, performance scripts, and poems of exquisite prosody, Mike Lala examines the human figure as subject and object, enemy and ally in the context of a progressively defigured and hostile world. Catullus, Shakespeare, Cy Twombly, and Lydia Delectorskaya echo across engagements with Israeli generals, accused terrorists, State Department employees, nuclear scientists, SaturdayNight Live actors, war criminals, malware, and a host of mythic, literary, and half-extant spectral characters. Amid the cacophony, Lala implicates every actor, including himself, in a web of shared culpability vis-a-vis consumerism, representation, speaking, writing, and making art against the backdrop of the endless, open wars of a post Cold War, post-2001 era. Exit Theater is a debut of and against its time, a book about war, art, and what it means to make art in a time of war.
About Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
D. A. Powell’s fifth book of poetry, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, explores the darker side of divisions and developments, the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, and bar. With witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates Powell’s exhilarating range.
About Novena
In poems inspired by and sometimes borrowing their forms from the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer addressing and seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, Jacques Rancourt explores the complexities of faith, desire, beauty, and justice. Novena is a collection that invites prayer not to symbols of dogmatic perfection but to those who are outcast or maligned, LGBTQ people, people in prison, people who resist, people who suffer and whose suffering has not been redeemed. In Novena, the Virgin Mary is recast as a drag queen, religious icons are merged with those who are abolished, and spiritual isolation is scrutinized in a queer pastoral.