Philip Kobylarz + Renee Rettig

Booksmith is excited to host Philip Kobylarz for his new book A Miscellany of Diverse Things. He’ll be in conversation with Renee Rettig.

Please note: this event will be held at the Bindery, 1727 Haight St. in San Francisco. It is free and open to the public. Join us!

The essence of a miscellany of diverse things is not merely to catalog a wunderkammer of everyday objects, but moreover to hold up a double mirror: one to reveal the interior lives of objects, and another to reflect the depths of their creators and owners. Kobylarz’s poetry may initially elevate the mundane, but its deepest design is to ask what the human possession divulges about the human being. The quotidian isn’t only ecstatic; the quotidian is a book of revelations.

With nods to Flaubert’s Le Dictionnaire des IdEes Recues and Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Kobylarz moves beyond a contained lexicon to a flung-open cabinet of curiosities. Encyclopedic in its compilation (more than 400 entries in this dictionary volume), miscellany avoids the static inventory list of a storehouse to embody the world as theatre. There are no museum exhibits, with objects isolated and preserved in glass cases. Instead, Kobylarz places spotlights on the minute, under-appreciated, and even unloved. He regards common objects as pearls within the world of an oyster, but never forgets their genesis of grit and irritant.