Poetry Reading: Adam Giannelli and Tarfia Faizullah

“This extraordinary and sobering debut begins with a literal stutter—‘Since I couldn't say tomorrow / I said Wednesday.’ In trade for this impediment, Adam Giannelli finds that, in poetry, what can’t be said gives way to what must be said.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“Giannelli’s debut is a quiet affair, but its simplicity masks layers and a longing for precision exhibited through minute adjustments, tweaked phrases, and shifting imagery. This striving for fluency could have been born from the childhood speech impediment the poet reflects on poignantly in the opening poem: “since I can’t say everlasting/ I say every/ lost thing"... Though perfect expression may be unattainable, poetry is often about the process, and it is a pleasure to watch Giannelli work (and rework) his magic.”—starred review, Publishers Weekly

“Faizullah’s entire collection—powerful, wide-ranging—is an affirmation, an accomplished second book.”—The Millions 

“In her fiercely original second collection, Tarfia Faizullah traverses the globe—northern Iraq; Flint, Mich.; West Texas; Bangladesh—and employs a range of formal experiments to illuminate acts of resistance in the face of injustice and violence.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

A poetry reading with Adam Giannelli, author of Tremulous Hinge, and Tarfia Faizullah, author of Registers of Illuminated Villages. A Q&A and signing will follow the reading.

At 57th Street Books

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About Tremulous Hinge: From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves—a stutterer's maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation—become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes. 

About Adam Giannelli: Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah.

About Registers of Illuminated Villages: Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq.

About Tarfia Faizullah: Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press 2018), as well as a previous poetry collection, Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award, and other honors. Her poems are published widely in periodicals and anthologies in the United States and abroad, including Poetry Magazine, Guernica, Tin House, and The Nation, are translated into Persian, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil, and Spanish, and have been featured at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Visiting Writer in Residence.