Poets Francesca Bell (Bright Stain), Lindsay Bernal (What It Doesn’t Have to Do With), and Remica Bingham-Risher (Starlight & Error) will read from their new collections.
Why should you attend?
“How deeply gratifying to see Francesca Bell’s electric, erotic and completely ravishing debut collection, Bright Stain, at last in the world. For the past ten years she has been writing some of the most charged, subtle and yet devastating poems in American poetry…. Bright Stain is one of the most darkly elegant and luminous books of recent years; it is, in all ways, truly a wonder.” —David St. John
“The poems in What It Doesn’t Have to Do With feel like right now: this raw moment and this vertiginous landscape and a used-up world. Emojis and a mouse named Heathcliff and Mark Rothko. The aching body and the wounded heart. Reading this book, I smile. I wince. I want to turn off all the lights, everywhere, and let in the light of the sad moon above.” —Paul Guest, author of One More Theory about Happiness
“There’s starlight and sunlight—and no error I could find—in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line…. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover…. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world-class book of poems. It’s the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing.” —Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host: The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
This event is part of the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book. A full schedule of events is available here.