Book Launch: Caitlin Bailey's Solve for Desire

Guthrie Theater
Pohlad Lobby, Level 9
818 South 2nd Street
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP REQUESTED.

6:00 pm Reception
6:30 pm Program

Join us at the Guthrie Theater to celebrate Caitlin Bailey, winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and her debut collection of poems, Solve for Desire. The evening will feature a reception, reading, and conversation between Caitlin and contest judge Srikanth Reddy.

Caitlin Bailey is the recipient of a Loft Mentor Series award and holds an MFA from Hamline University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Solve for Desire explores the intense relationship between siblings Georg and Grete Trakl, Austrian artists who lived in the tumult of the early twentieth century—both addicted to drugs. While Georg’s poetry is widely celebrated, much less is known about Grete, who died by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. Solve for Desiresummons Grete from the shadows. As Peter Campion says, Bailey’s “gift for balancing lyric intensity with narrative inquiry reveals a major new talent.”

“In these imagined letters of musical prodigy Grete Trakl to her brother Georg, Caitlin Bailey justaposes anguished deisre with ravishing grief, a charged inner life with the outer world of the early twentiety century. Bailey’s imagination and lyricism are astonishing.” —Patricia Kirkpatrick

RSVP NOW.