Boston College Ireland
43 Saint Stephen's Green
Dublin 2
Ireland
Free and open to the public.
Erika Meitner (Holy Moly Carry Me, 2018, most recently a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Wayne Miller (Post-, 2016, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize) will give readings and be in conversation with Dr Catherine Gander of Maynooth University, Ireland.
Praise for Holy Moly Carry Me:
“In the stunning, exact, and haunting book Holy Moly Carry Me, Meitner’s strong signature voice is on full display, but with a complex empathy for the violent, messed-up world. These are powerful poems that wonder, ache, fear, question, delve into history, and somehow never stop praising the human capacity for survival.” — Ada Limón
Praise for Post-:
“This is poetry at its most powerful: instrument of change, defense against the commonplace of mall shooters and hoax bombs, deeply entered wisdom of the body in both birth and dying, and a bastion against loss and forgetting. Wayne Miller’s Post- doesn’t take this century lying down, it is a ringing rejoinder to those who say poetry does not matter. In Miller’s lines, we hear the ancient magic of sorrow transformed to hope, elegy bent back around to ode.”—D. A. Powell
Wayne Miller
Wayne Miller’s books of poetry include Only the Senses Sleep, The Book of Props, The City, Our City, Post-, and We the Jury.
Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of its future.
These poems exist in the wake of catastrophe: rogue gunmen, debt, hoax bombs, riots, and consumerism all haunt its pages. And yet this collection cuts through pain to open up a way forward, thrumming with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of living.
A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City”—an unnamed, crowded place. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the City’s immensity.
A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in these poems often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience. This collection is an imaginative yet authentic inquiry into the varied constructs in which we define love.