The Poetics of Place
From the pastoral to the postmodern — from Paterson, New Jersey, to the Sonoran Desert — poets have always sought to explore the reflexive relationship between person and place. Today our authors will discuss home, displacement, and the interplay between place and imagination.
| Where: | Student Union Kiva (Seats 100)  |
| When: | Sat, Mar 15, 1:00 pm - 1:55 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Area - UA Campus Store Main Floor (following presentation)
|
| Genre: | Poetry |
| Moderator: | Gabriel Dozal |
| Sponsor: | Session made possible courtesy of Max McCauslin and John Smith |
Panelists
Forrest GanderForrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator/writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s received the Pulitzer Prize, Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim and US Artists Foundations....
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Farid MatukFarid Matuk is the author of "Moon Mirrored Indivisible," "Redolent," "The Real Horse," "This Is a Nice Neighborhood," and "My Daughter La Chola." They are also the translator from the Spanish of "The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist" by the Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta....
Gabriel PalaciosGabriel Palacios was born in Tucson, Arizona and earned an MFA from the University of Arizona, where he was the recipient of the Minnie Torrance Award for Poetry, selected by giovanni singleton. He works as a college writing instructor and serves as a contributing editor for Diagram....
Books:
Mojave Ghost
Forrest Gander
Poetry
New Directions Publishing Corporation
October 2024
ISBN 9780811237956
80 pages
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Moon Mirrored Indivisible
Farid Matuk
Poetry
University of Chicago Press
March 2025
ISBN 9780226840000
96 pages
Buy nowA previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence.
Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on one another to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another. More/less
A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign
Gabriel Palacios
Poetry
Fonograf Editions
March 2024
ISBN 9798987589045
104 pages
Buy nowIn A TEN PESO BURIAL FOR WHICH TRUTH I SIGN, debut poet Gabriel Palacios slipstreams through a hauntological, historicized Southwest, to make sense out of the life inherited.
Episodes of modern decay, violence and indignity co-mingle with the colonial horrors sometimes visited upon, and often committed by the ancestors of the author, who traveled from Basque Spain to the Southwestern border region in the Eighteenth-century. These are poems that reckon with complicity: historic and on the streets of South Tucson, Arizona in the present. This collection represents a prism through which we assess time, place, and the specters of one’s own conduct and circumstances. More/less
