Event guidelines:
- All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
- Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
- Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
- A signing will follow the talk.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/pNOlzxr7rdM
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, offers an intimate account of fatherhood, loss, grief, and family.
Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father’s unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father’s trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua’s death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.
Miller Oberman is the author of Impossible Things (Duke University Press, 2024) and The Unstill Ones, (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017). He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Miller's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, Foglifter, London Review of Books, and The Nation. Miller teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets and teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in Queens, New York.
jason b crawford is a Black queer poet. They are the author of YEET! (Omnidawn, 2025) and Year of the Unicorn Kidz (Sundress Publications, 2022). A Lambda Literary Fellow, crawford was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Lansing, Michigan.
Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic Korean poet, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for her book DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS & NIGHT SWIM & winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022). Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in POETRY, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Ninth Letter, Rattle, AAWW (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander & elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column, The Legacy Suite, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name(2021) was selected by Newfound for their Emerging Poets Series. She is the 2024 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium where she is at work on her debut collection of poems.