Join us as poets Achy Obejas and Phillip Williams share poetry from their new releases and shed light on how poetry leads our languages in representing marginalized voices, identities, and truths. The poets will be in conversation with poet Gary Dop.
In Boomerang/Bumerán (Beacon Press), Achy Obejas offers a unique bilingual collection written in a bold, mostly gender-free English and Spanish. The poems address immigration, displacement, love (lost and found), and activism—that is, on ways of addressing injustice and repairing the world. The volume will be both inspiration and support for readers living with marginalized identities and those who love and stand with them.
In Mutiny (Penguin Poets), Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined—and then, through a generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.