The Poetry of Exile
Sunday, May 8 | 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM- In-Person Only
Brower Center - Tamalpais Room
- 2022
- Poetry
From Dante to Liu Tsung-yuan to Pablo Neruda, the subject of exile has been fertile ground for poetry. Four contemporary luminaries put their own singular spins on this timeless theme. New York Times Magazine poetry editor Victoria Chang draws from the mysteries in her own lineage: the granddaughter of Chinese refugees to Taiwan, and the daughter of Tawinese immigrants to Michigan, she asks, in her collection Dear Memory, “What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed?” For Shangyang Fang (Burying the Mountain), the music of ancient Chinese poetry is a conduit for exploring exile and erasure. Achy Obejas, in Boomerang/Bumerán, discovers inventive ways to release her poems from the binary confines of linguistic gender in a bilingual collection that contends with immigration and displacement, love and loss. And Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float, which Pultizer winner Tracy K. Smith calls “resonant with the desire for rapture and the never-easing reality of loss,” is a tender and allusive testament to grief and the lifeforce, in equal measure. Get gloriously lost with these wandering works of uprooting and transcendence.
The bookstore partner for this session is Eastwind Books of Berkeley! Buy the books online at Bookshop.org or purchase them in person at the Festival. More information here.
Book signing information: East Wind Books Tent at the Bookstore Blv (corner of Allston & Milvia in the Outdoor Fair) at in the park, 2:15 PM