1231 9th Ave. (@ Lincoln Way)
San Francisco, CA 94122
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AND WILL TAKE PLACE AT 7:00 PST.
Join Elizabeth Metzger for a reading and conversation to celebrate her newest collection Lying In.
A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.
“All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of death unsettles all outcomes, these poems examine an expansion and fracturing of the self—into motherhood as well as childhood, into past selves and future unknowns. The child becomes parent, the parent becomes child, the child arrives but in doing so is lost. New loss haunts new life, and life becomes “one or two lives.” The door is more valuable than the prize behind it.
Elizabeth Metzger
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed.
Ryann Stevenson
Ryann Stevenson is the author of Human Resources, selected by Henri Cole as winner of the 2021 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Adroit Journal, American Letters & Commentary, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, and Linebreak, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.
Brian Tierney
Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, which was selected by Randall Mann as the winner of the 20-2021 Jake Adam York Prize.
A devastating, vulnerable collection tracing high-risk pregnancy and new motherhood amid grief.
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.
Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.