An Afternoon of Poetry with Carrie Olivia Adams, Nathan Hoks, & Anna Zumbahlen - Srikanth Reddy

Carrie Olivia Adams, Nathan Hoks, and Anna Zumbahlen will read from and discuss their new poetry books, The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Moony Days of Being, and Surety, respectively. They will be joined in conversation by Srikanth Chicu Reddy. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

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About the Books: The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore. Altogether, the poems are controlled, precise investigations and interrogations of the ideas and images we take for granted.

Moony Days of Being, the fourth collection by Nathan Hoks, inhabits a world of flammable metaphors and spiritual fog machines with poems that are part elegy, part glitch, part lunar broadcast. Mermaids drift through industrial runoff, tongues appear in coffee, and friendship breaks apart into sea glass and static. By turns humorous, mournful, and defiant, these odes and self-portraits blur the border between interior and exterior worlds as they wrestle with parenthood, loss, and ecological despair. Moony Days of Being is a book of hallucinatory clarity, a wager that even the broken can be buoyant in a poetic landscape where sorrow coexists with wild associative joy—and even a millipede is holy.

Anna Zumbahlen's debut collection Surety traverses memory while attending to the landscape of northwestern Iowa during a year that brought ecopolitical tensions to the surface of daily life in a small town. These poems open the state of mind that produces lyric poetry onto questions of solitude, selfhood, place, and community in a record of generosities, violences, and contradictions. Set in acres planted with corn and soy, lined by roadsides overgrown with thistles and prairie rose, Surety maps intercounty disputes over pollution in the watershed, catalogues seasonal shifts and flora both cultivated and wild, and probes a private loss. This collection locates surety in poetry itself, and in what poetry makes legible in life and love. 

About the Authors: Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean and the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks “Proficiency Badges,” “Grapple,” “Overture in the Key of F,” and “A Useless Window.” She writes the “Poetry & Biscuits” newsletter on Substack and curates a house reading series by the same name. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.

Nathan Hoks is the author of Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles, and most recently, Moony Days of Being. His work has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California and author of Surety (Inlandia, 2026). Find recent work at www.annazum.com.

About the Interlocutor: Srikanth Chicu Reddy is a poet, scholar, and literary editor working at the intersection of creative and critical practice in the humanities. As a writer of South Asian descent, his creative work falls within a broad paradigm of Asian American, diasporic, and transnational poetics. In addition to teaching in the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing, he also serves as Series Editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.