VIRTUAL: Omnidawn Spring Book Launch

Booksmith and The Bindery are pleased to host Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will be reading from their work. Be the first to own these new treasures:

100 Words by Damon Potter & Truong Tran

Boyish by Brody Parrish Craig (winner of the Omnidawn Chapbook contest)

Life in a Field by Katie Peterson (winner of the Omnidawn Open Book contest)

Luminaires by Kristin Keane (winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction contest)

Tropical Lung exi(s)t(s) by Roberto Harrison

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

About 100 Words by Damon Potter & Truong Tran

Written as a conversation engaged over the course of 100 words. It is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens and ideals between someone Brown and someone White. It is an attempt by one to put the weight down and another’s willingness to pick it up. It is a private conversation made public. It is an exchange, a negotiation, discoveries. I did not know this about myself. You crossed the street or was it I? We walk and this weight, we are still carrying it together.

Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within The Margins, and Four Letter Words. He also authored the children’s book, Going Home Coming Home, an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French and Dutch. He is the recipient of The Poetry Center Prize, The Fund For Poetry Grant, The California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. He lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Mills College, Oakland.

Damon Potter lives and works in San Francisco. Poems have previously published in Elderly, and Mirage #4/Period[ical].

To have 100 Words sent to your door, order here.

About Boyish by Brody Parrish Craig

Boyish engages what once thought impossible: a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, of upbringing, rebellion, and revival. The coming to Jesus moments of looking back, of liberation & reckoning. Each page exterior & interior revolutions. To carve space between. To cut-up the absence. To find oneself carried over graveled creekside into the first mouth’s babble. As much subconscious as embodied desire, change holds within the white space and the formal play—language twisting the unspeakable alongside dense sonnets, a thicket of warmth & dissonance that holds a mirror up to puddled overpass & river. The landscapes of city’s dystopia meeting the queer pastoral, where conservation often means what must burn down.

Originally from Louisiana, Brody Parrish Craig is a poet & tranarchist who currently lives in the Ozarks. They are an educator and creator of TWANG, a regional creative project for TGNC folks in the South & Midwest US. BPC’s poetry has appeared in TYPO, EOAGH, Gigantic Sequins & Crab Fat Magazine, amongst others. They can often be found by the creek.

To have Boyish sent to your door, order here.

About Life in a Field by Katie Peterson

Life in a Field is a comedy about climate change. In the story, a girl and a donkey become friends. Then, they decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses slow-moving, cinematic paragraphs in image-driven, sensual prose with three folios of images by the photographer Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory take on the character of events. A narrative voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our daily and familiar strife, towards what remains of beauty and pleasure. In clear, exacting sentences, Life in a Field attempts, against all evidence, to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”

Katie Peterson is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News. Her third collection, The Accounts, won the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. She is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis, where she directs the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Young Suh, and their daughter Emily.

To have Life in a Field sent to your door, order here.

About Luminaires by Kristin Keane

Agnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her, her husband doesn’t understand her and lately, she’s begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. Hopeful the time there will help make the stealing stop, when the spirits of the campers’ parents realize Agnes can act as a conduit to their children through their things, she has to navigate using her compulsion to either feed herself or to help the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and about the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss, to reach for the things we hope balm us, and the risks we’re willing to take to stymie yearning—both in our material lives and in the ones we pass through.

Kristin Keane‘s work has appeared with the New England Review, The Normal School, Electric Literature and elsewhere. She is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. More of her work can be found at thisisnotreallyhere.space.

To have Luminaires sent to your door, order here.

About Tropical Lung exi(s)t(s) by Roberto Harrison

These are writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a new homeland of Panamá that can be transmitted through the quantum martyrs beyond life and death, and/or a new homeland of the Tecumseh Republic, where technology grows to be necessary in understanding the ancient as well as then becoming erased and transcended by a now ever present electronic circle. It is a book brought close to the earth in its symbolic springs, to the light filled mystery that began with countering disassociation and by repairing a devastating explosion of interior structures necessary to being a person in the most foundational ways. It is where the screen removes itself by song as we move toward kinship beyond color mark.

Roberto Harrison‘s poetry books include Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), Os (subpress, 2006), as well as many chapbooks. With Andrew Levy, Roberto edited the poetry journal Crayon from 1997 to 2008. He is also the editor of Bronze Skull Press which has published over 20 chapbooks, including the work of many Midwestern poets. Most recently Roberto served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little : Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology. He was the Milwaukee Poet Laureate for 2017-2019 and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife the poet Brenda Cárdenas.

To have Tropical Lung exi(s)t(s) to your door, order here.