Cafe Steam Poetry Pop-up featuring John McCarthy, Lisa Higgs, and Tracy Zeman

Lisa Higgs, John McCarthy (Scared Violent Like Horses, 2019), and Tracy Zeman will read from their recently published or forthcoming books of poetry.

About the authors
Lisa Higgs’ third chapbook, Earthen Bound, is a collection of sonnets culled from work that she wrote to her grandmother every week following the latter’s diagnosis with terminal uterine cancer. The chapbook is an intimate exploration of grief, love, and living a life without regrets.

John McCarthy’s Scared Violent Like Horses is populated by a family strangled by silence: a father drunk and mute in the passenger seat, a mother sinking into bed like a dish at the bottom of a sink, and a boy whose friends play punch-for-punch for fun. Constant throughout is the brutality of the Midwestern landscape that, like the people who inhabit it, turns out to be beautiful in its vulnerability: sedgegrass littered with plastic bags floating like ghosts, dilapidated houses with abandoned Fisher Price toys in the yard, and silos of dirt and rust under a sky that struggles to remember the ground below.

Tracy Zeman’s first full-length collection, Empire, examines the European settlement and ecological devastation of the North American prairie. Zeman uses image, juxtaposition and fragment to tell the story of a savage and intricate landscape, once conquered and now imperiled by forces such as climate change, invasive species and contemporary agricultural and land practices. Empire is a journey through an endangered world where beauty is enshrined and the lost, human and animal, is elegized.

Learn more.