Poetry Presenters
Each poet will be reading Saturday afternoon and presenting in general sessions throughout the weekend.
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in the fall of 2022. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out now. Myles’s fiction includes Chelsea Girls, which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You, Inferno (a poet’s novel), and Afterglow. Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. They live in New York & Marfa, Texas.
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The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.
a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.
With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.
Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently ARMY OF GIANTS, published by Wave Books. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Believer Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He co-founded of Fence magazine and studied at the University of Michigan, University College Dublin, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. One of his tattoos has appeared in two books of literary tattoos. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU.
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Matthew Rohrer's Army of Giants is a diverse meditation on the ways in which the physical world intersects, overlaps, and informs the universe of the imagination.
Formally audacious, these are poems that playfully engage with word constraint, iambic pentameter, and long-sentence forms, keeping us in a constant state of surprise and curiosity. By sanctifying everything from lava lamps, cemeteries, and clouds to literary heroes such as Anna Ahkmatova, Chika Sagawa, and Lewis Warsh, Matthew Rohrer continues his project of uncovering wonder wherever it can found. In poems that rise and build toward a gigantic peak at the center, Army of Giants provides new poetic vistas from which we can contemplate the worlds we inhabit.
M. Bartley Seigel
M. Bartley Seigel is a former poet laureate of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His poetry frequently appears in literary journals such as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, The Fourth River, and THRUSH. He lives with his family on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory, where he teaches at Michigan Technological University.
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Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region's mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like "Beach Glass" highlight Seigel's lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel's poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.
Robin Walter
Robin Walter is a poet, book artist, and printmaker. Walter is the author of Little Mercy, which was selected by Victoria Chang as the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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In award-winning poet Robin Walter’s debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking—seeing feelingly—become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist.
Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter’s poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather—all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive.
Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.