Reading: P. Scott Cunningham’s Ya Te Veo

Poet, essayist, and translator P. Scott Cunningham joins us in the bookstore to read from his debut poetry collection, Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas), which Billy Collins calls “a distinctive collection by a very savvy young poet.” Scott will be joined Twin Cities-based poets Michael Kleber-Diggs and Katharine Rauk.

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Ya Te Veo takes as its title the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters. Among the seized are poets and painters alongside musicians from Garth Brooks to Wu-Tang Clan to the composer Morton Feldman, whose mysterious personality serves as a backdrop in many poems for meditations on intimacy, ethics, and anxiety.

As the phrase “ya te veo” (“I see you”) implies, this is a book interested in revealing what we think is hidden, in questioning the gap inside all of us, a gap between what we feel and what we say and do, making space for our many contradictions.

Like the works of Feldman, these poems focus and recede, experimenting with form in order to accomplish a state of deep concentration. They impersonate sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, monologues, translations, and freestyles, but inexactly, embracing failed imitation as an opportunity to remix the familiar.

P. SCOTT CUNNINGHAM’S poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Harvard Review, The Awl, POETRY, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian. He lives in Miami, Florida, where he serves as the director of O, Miami and the editor of Jai-Alai Books.

MICHAEL KLEBER-DIGGS is a poet and essayist. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Poetry City, North Dakota Quarterly, Pollen Midwest, Paper Darts, Water~Stone Review and a few anthologies. He enjoys collaboration with visual artists. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African-America Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Michael is husband to Karen. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is an accomplished dancer.

KATHARINE RAUK is the author of Buried Choirs (Tinderbox Editions) and the chapbook Basil (Black Lawrence Press). She has poems published in Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, Best of the Net 2012, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in the Twin Cities.