Join us to celebrate Francesca Bell's latest poetry collection, What Small Sound, with fellow authors Laura Read, Tiffany Midge, Douglas Manuel, and Maya Jewell Zeller!
Monday, May 15th, 2023 at 7pm at Auntie's Bookstore (402 W Main Ave).
This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP below!
About What Small Sound
Francesca Bell's second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist's booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.
About Francesca Bell
Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound (Red Hen Press, 2023). She translated Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her poems and translations appear in New Ohio Review, North American Review, Mid- American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives with her family in Novato, California.
About But, She is Also Jane
Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women’s lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past. Laura Read’s third poetry collection balances discussions of Degas, Vermeer, and Marie Curie with reflections on Sammy Hagar, a troubling outing to a male revue, and memories of watching Mork and Mindy on the night of her mother’s hysterectomy.
About Laura Read
Laura Read is author of But She Is Also Jane, Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, and the chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She served as poet laureate for Spokane, Washington, from 2015 to 2017 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and the Eastern Washington University MFA program in creative writing.
About Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she doesn’t like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege.
Midge ponders Standing Rock, feminism, and a tweeting president, all while exploring her own complex identity and the loss of her mother. Employing humor as an act of resistance, these slices of life and matchless takes on urban-indigenous identity disrupt the colonial narrative and provide commentary on popular culture, media, feminism, and the complications of identity, race, and politics.
About Tiffany Midge
Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Formerly a humor columnist for Indian Country Today, she currently writes a column for High Country News and has published articles for The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, First American Art Magazine, World Literature Today, and more. Midge is the author of essays Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and the poetry collection The Woman Who Married A Bear, winner of The Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize.
About Trouble Funk
Soundtracked with soul, disco, and funk hits from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the speaker of Testify returns in Trouble Funk to tell the story of how his parents met and fell in and out of love.
About Douglas Manuel
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. His first collection of poems, Testify, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry, and his poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.
About Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts
Poetry. Women's Studies. Ecopoetics. Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts charts a course into magical waters, anchoring itself in the frightening politicization of a woman's body. The chemistry of this conversation between Spokane Poet, Maya Jewell Zeller, and Seattle artist, Carrie DeBacker, includes pomegranates for human heads, bones that can walk, and a ship sprung from a person's back, floating farther from shore. The speaker in these incantations, behind these urgent watercolors, muses on the philosophies of geologic time, climate change, human genomes, and existential destruction. This book sets out to discover meaning in this terrible, beautiful time--and suggests wonder is where we'll find it: the diagnosis is strong / for the wild & wind mills. We are proud to bring out this troubling work of eco-feminism in gorgeous full color. It may well be the most colorful poetry book you buy all year, but don't be fooled, it's an intense work of anxiety in an age of political and environmental upheaval.
About Maya Jewell Zeller
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts, the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees, and the poetry collection Rust Fish; her humor writing appears in such places as Booth and Necessary Fiction. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Poetry Faculty for Western Colorado University's low-res MFA. Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.
Francesca Bell's second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril.
Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women’s lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past.
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice.
Soundtracked with soul, disco, and funk hits from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the speaker of Testify returns in Trouble Funk to tell the story of how his parents met and fell in and out of love.
(Please note: This book cannot be returned.)
Poetry. Women's Studies. Ecopoetics. ALCHEMY FOR CELLS & OTHER BEASTS charts a course into magical waters, anchoring itself in the frightening politicization of a woman's body.
"What Small Sound" by Francesca Bell & Fellow Poets