Mon March 4, 2024
9th Ave: Diana Khoi Nguyen and Cindy Juyoung Ok with aracelis girmay
SEE EVENT DETAILS
Join us on Monday, March 4 at 7pm PT when we celebrate the release of Diana Khoi Nguyen and Cindy Juyoung Ok's collections, Root Fractures and Ward Toward, with aracelis girmay at 9th Ave!
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online/Livestream link available soon
About Root Fractures
National Book Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection is a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
About Ward Toward
In the 118th volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided cities to separated countries, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs the connections between these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fissures and confinement but hope, humor, and connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be re-assembled into a new place of belonging.
About Diana Khoi Nguyen
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024) and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which won the Kate Tufts Award and Colorado Book Award. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and 92Y "Discovery" Poetry winner, she teaches in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
About Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), chosen by Rae Armantrout, and the chapbook House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), with poems in Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review. A MacDowell Fellow, she is a Kenyon Review Fellow and teaches poetry writing at Kenyon College.
About aracelis girmay
aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016). Her essays, interviews, and poems have been published in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books online, The Poetry Review, and Astra, among other places. She also makes books for young people, including the collaboration with Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau & ZuZu Find A Way (forthcoming with Enchanted Lion). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
show less
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online/Livestream link available soon
About Root Fractures
National Book Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection is a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
About Ward Toward
In the 118th volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided cities to separated countries, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs the connections between these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fissures and confinement but hope, humor, and connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be re-assembled into a new place of belonging.
About Diana Khoi Nguyen
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024) and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which won the Kate Tufts Award and Colorado Book Award. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and 92Y "Discovery" Poetry winner, she teaches in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
About Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), chosen by Rae Armantrout, and the chapbook House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), with poems in Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review. A MacDowell Fellow, she is a Kenyon Review Fellow and teaches poetry writing at Kenyon College.
About aracelis girmay
aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016). Her essays, interviews, and poems have been published in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books online, The Poetry Review, and Astra, among other places. She also makes books for young people, including the collaboration with Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau & ZuZu Find A Way (forthcoming with Enchanted Lion). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
Join us on Monday, March 4 at 7pm PT when we celebrate the release of Diana Khoi Nguyen and Cindy Juyoung Ok's collections, Root Fractures and Ward Toward, with aracelis girmay at 9th Ave!
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online/Livestream link available soon
About Root Fractures
National Book Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection is a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
About Ward Toward
In the 118th volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided cities to separated countries, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs the connections between these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fissures and confinement but hope, humor, and connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be re-assembled into a new place of belonging.
About Diana Khoi Nguyen
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024) and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which won the Kate Tufts Award and Colorado Book Award. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and 92Y "Discovery" Poetry winner, she teaches in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
About Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), chosen by Rae Armantrout, and the chapbook House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), with poems in Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review. A MacDowell Fellow, she is a Kenyon Review Fellow and teaches poetry writing at Kenyon College.
About aracelis girmay
aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016). Her essays, interviews, and poems have been published in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books online, The Poetry Review, and Astra, among other places. She also makes books for young people, including the collaboration with Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau & ZuZu Find A Way (forthcoming with Enchanted Lion). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
read more
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online/Livestream link available soon
About Root Fractures
National Book Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection is a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
About Ward Toward
In the 118th volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided cities to separated countries, from a bedroom that is the site of domestic abuse to a hospice ward that is the site of neglect. Ok plumbs the connections between these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of language, word to word, as she uncovers not only fissures and confinement but hope, humor, and connection. Using visual poetry and found text, she counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's energizing debut begins the work of breaking language to find the fissures where it can be re-assembled into a new place of belonging.
About Diana Khoi Nguyen
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024) and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which won the Kate Tufts Award and Colorado Book Award. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and 92Y "Discovery" Poetry winner, she teaches in the Randolph College low-residency MFA and is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
About Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), chosen by Rae Armantrout, and the chapbook House Work (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), with poems in Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review. A MacDowell Fellow, she is a Kenyon Review Fellow and teaches poetry writing at Kenyon College.
About aracelis girmay
aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016). Her essays, interviews, and poems have been published in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books online, The Poetry Review, and Astra, among other places. She also makes books for young people, including the collaboration with Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau & ZuZu Find A Way (forthcoming with Enchanted Lion). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
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1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94111
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