A Reading with Jessica Laser & Daniel Poppick

"Finally an oracle with a gorgeous sense of humor. Jessica Laser's vision is singular, her voice at once formidable and intimate. Its impeccable wit imparts a bracing metaphysics.”—Margaret Ross

"Poppick’s stop-motion ability to convey multitude in moments is genius—Merwin-like in its sensorial clarity, and, where the poet chooses formal restriction, Keatsian in density and bloom.”—Brenda Shaughnessy

A reading with Jessica Laser, author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides, and Daniel Poppick, author of Fear of Description. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides: Jessica Laser's debut collection of poetry. A book of feminist oratory, giving courtly love a much-needed update. Here, thinking is feeling and knowing is loving. These poems recover wisdom in an information age.

About Jessica Laser: Jessica Laser was born in Chicago. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and two chapbooks. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she taught writing in New York before moving to Berkeley, where she is currently a PhD student in English. 

About Fear of Description: Winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy. These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? Cutting back and forth in time and ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and technology, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions—searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness.

About Daniel Poppick: Daniel Poppick is the author of Fear of Description (Penguin, 2019), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the National Poetry Series, and The Police (Omnidawn, 2017). He lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and co-edits the Catenary Press.