Rachel Zucker & Tiana Clark - "SoundMachine" & "I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood" - Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Rachel Zucker and Tiana Clark discuss SoundMachine and I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

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About SoundMachine: Rachel Zucker sweeps all the corners in this maximalist project of poems and prose, navigating love, loss, and personal and political despair. Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, she trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

About Rachel Zucker: Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, including, most recently, SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker is an adjunct professor at New York University and the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). Zucker is currently working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine) and a book of lectures called The Poetics of Wrongness. For more information visit www.rachelzucker.net

About I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood: For prize-winning poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because Tiana cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—she will always see blood on the leaves.

About Tiana Clark: Tiana Clark is the winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, as well as a winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. For more information visit http://www.tianaclark.com

About the interlocutor: Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a poet and scholar whose chapbook Stopgap won the 2018 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest. His critical and creative work appears in journals such as Callaloo, Tupelo Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, and Salamander. Isaac is currently a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry & Poetics Graduate Cluster. Visit him online at http://isaacginsbergmiller.com