VIRTUAL: Claire Marie Stancek with Dan Beachy-Quick & Jennifer Firestone / wyrd] bird

Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host a virtual event with Claire Marie Stancek for her new book of poems, wyrd] bird. She’s joined by Dan Beachy-Quick and Jennifer Firestone.

Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order a copy of wyrd] bird here. We’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.

In addition to wyrd] bird (Omnidawn Publishing), Claire Marie Stancek is the author of two previous poetry books, Oil Spell (Omnidawn Publishing) and MOUTHS (Noemi Press). She earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from University of California, Berkeley, where she currently works as a staff writer. With Jane Gregory and Lyn Hejinian, she co-edits Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Originally from outside Toronto, Ontario, she now lives in Oakland, California.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include Arrows (Tupelo Press) and Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions), a collection of translations from the ancient Greek. Recently long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, his work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is an University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry: Story (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Flashes (Shearsman Books) and Holiday (Shearsman Books). She is currently collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.