Join us for an evening with Laura Kolbe, who will read from her new poetry collection, The Decadent Movement. A conversation with Helen Chandler will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin—that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth.
This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse—“Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life” —allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the “pregnancy plot.”
The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.
About the Author: Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Conjunctions, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual contest winner and published in 2025. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.
About the Moderator: Helen Chandler is an Irish writer based in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at UVA. Her debut novel, Further Education, is forthcoming from Penguin Sandycove in June 2027.
The Decadent Movement will be released on September 22. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Laura Kolbe’s sonic, wordsmithy poems are granular and cosmic, traveling that edge where inner and outer space meet, where these poems spill like milk off the page, strange, sticky, fluid, flowing, alive. In this realm, maternal reality is lived, living, imminent and insistent, and repeating, echoing, lapping, lapsing, collapsing, collecting. Here, the poet’s mind makes real a mother’s life—so often fragmented—meeting chaos with textured, visceral lines that furnish a world, tend a family, and inscribe a full self in full bloom."
—Brenda Shaughnessy
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Helen Chandler Photo Credit: Leah O’Connell