Jessica E. Johnson - "Insecurity System," Oliva Cronk - "Womonster," and Sara Wainscott - "Metabolics"
Sara Wainscott will discuss Insecurity System: Poems. Olivia Cronk will discuss Womonster. Jessica E. Johnson will discuss Metabolics: Poems.
This event will be held in person at The Seminary Co-op. At this time, masks are required for in-store events.
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About Insecurity System: Sappho meets Springsteen in Insecurity System, a wry exploration of memory, motherhood, interdimensional time–travel, and the precarious future. Propelled by existential longing, these poems cycle between tenderness and rage, desire and despair, tracking the intertwined anxieties of making a living and making a life.
About Womonster: Olivia Cronk’s Womonster is a psychedelic exploration of the “impossibility of a coherent self.” Via several poetical modes—imagistic, confessional, gothic, and surrealist—Cronk’s language transforms as it encounters genre tropes from campy horror and detective movies. Her vivid imagination is foregrounded but firmly rooted in the material realities of working and raising her child. The book is unlike anything I’ve read before.
About Metabolics: Metabolics portrays the experiences of a single speaker, a mother, teacher, and woman trying to control her body through calorie counters and negotiate her time with digital devices while navigating roles, identities, impulses, and relationships that are often in tension.
About the authors: Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System, the winner of the 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (Persea 2020). She lives outside Chicago.
Olivia Cronk is the author of Womonster (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she edits The Journal Petra.
Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry, nonfiction, and things in between. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, River Teeth, Poetry Northwest, Tin House, DIAGRAM, Four Way Review, The New Republic, Sixth Finch, and Dream Pop, among others. She is an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and an Oregon Book Award Finalist for her chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press). Her first full-length collection, Metabolics, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2023. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College.
Related Titles
Poetry. Women's Studies. Taking the form of two long poems, Interro-Porn and Chenille, WOMONSTER explores the often monstrous and buffoonish impossibility of a coherent self, even as its speakers take great pleasure in the performance of selves. Everywhere absorbing and leaking other media,...
