Christina Pugh - "The Right Hand" & Karen An-hwei Lee - "The Beautiful Immunity"

Wednesday, January 29, 2025 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Event Presenter/Author: 
Christina Pugh & Karen An-hwei Lee

Authors Christina Pugh and Karen An-hwei Lee will each be discussing their poetry collections, The Right Hand and The Beautiful Immunity, respectively. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested by not required.)

About the Books:

Pain, piercing, and language: with urgent lyricism and lacunae on the page, The Right Hand explores the physical, emotional, and philosophical experiences of chronic pain, bodywork (especially acupuncture), and healing. In the second half of the collection, the poet spends extended time with Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome, finding this famous scene of wounding to be in dialogue with her own experience of pain, as well as her suspension between languages and spiritual isolation. In The Right Hand, the hidden sites of the body speak, and Bernini’s centuries-old arrow pierces us with hurting eloquence.

The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity—an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word “anthropause” floated indelibly into the world’s vocabulary.

About the Authors:

In 2024, Christina Pugh published her sixth book of poetry, The Right Hand (Tupelo Press) and a book of essays on poetry, Ghosts and the Overplus (University of Michigan Press “Poets on Poetry series). Her five previous books of poems include Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The Atlantic, Poetry, Yale Review, Colorado Review, and other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and others. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was recently announced Distinguished Scholar of the Year in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Karen An-hwei Lee’s recent poetry collections are The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press 2024) and Duress (Cascade Books 2022). Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, and anthologized in Best Spiritual Writing and Pearson’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing (14th Edition, ed. by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia)Lee has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and the Norma Farber First Book Award for In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004). She lives and works in greater Chicago. 

Event Location: 
Seminary Co-op
5751 S Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637