Join us for the release of Laura Eve Engel’s debut poetry collection, Things That Go. Writer Jeff Martin will kick off the evening, followed by a reading from Laura Eve Engel. This event will be free and open to the public.
Framed by a retelling of the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who looked back on the destruction of her city and was transformed into a monument of its destruction, Laura Eve Engel’s muscular poems enact a long, unblinking look at symbols of American progress—trains, buildings, the vast American west—to strain against the notion of looking as passive. These poems suggest a constant and powerful movement forward as an antidote to the current moment, and to the heart’s timeless struggles with itself. This ambitious debut wrestles with the ethics of love and loss, and bears witness to our collective experience of limitless looking, reminding us that “the future is coming / and we’re all in it.”
"Laura Eve Engel’s supple, alert, dazzling, unpredictable poems are vibrantly alive: they turn and bend in daring and fantastic ways to access new angles of vision. Things That Go bristles with a verve that works to unsettle 'the signage in our minds,' expanding the seeable as these poems bring it unnervingly closer to the sayable. Engel knows 'vigilance against the new appearance / of old growth / has never been enough / we must rewrite the ground.' This book is that rewriting."
Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award
Laura Eve Engel is the recipient of fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, PEN America, Tin House, and elsewhere. She’s in a band called The Old Year.
Jeff Martin’s stories have appeared in New England Review, Mississippi Review, Sou’wester, and No Tokens Journal, among others. He co-directs the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop.