S. Brook Corfman’s Luxury, Blue Lace with S. Yarberry

Join us in the bookstore for this reading with poets S. Yarberry and S. Brook Corfman! Featuring S. Brook’s new collection Luxury, Blue Lace and the new Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride containing work from S. Yarberry, edited by Andrea Jenkins, John Medeiros, and Lisa Marie Brimmer. Reading followed by reception and book signing. Learn more.

Luxury, Blue Lace (Autumn House Press)

Often, the fact of being an individual can seem wildly at odds with the experience of containing multitudes. In Luxury, Blue Lace, S. Brook Corfman takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain. Corfman’s poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge. Luxury, Blue Lace was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in 2018.

“Relying on abstraction and the unspoken, Corfman shapes a story of unique gender experience and transformation in this extraordinary debut… .Corfman writes from carefully detailed liminal spaces, producing a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review ★

Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride (Minnesota Historical Society Press)

Since its beginnings in 1993, the Queer Voices reading series has featured both emerging and established Minnesota-based writers of the LGBTQIA+ community. With a track record of more than twenty years, the series has become a national model and one of Minnesota’s most important literary institutions. It is reputed to be the longest-running curated queer reading series in the country.

In this volume, series curators John Medeiros and Andrea Jenkins and facilitator Lisa Marie Brimmer present the finest poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces by the presenters. Their work, generated and performed in a powerful space of understanding, explores the material of life without internal or external censorship. Living, loving, working, learning, playing, reflecting, knowing, inventing, and being—these magnificent queer voices affirm the importance of civil literacy and the power of vulnerability.

S. Yarberry is a trans-masc writer pursuing their MFA in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, Indiana Review, The Offing, jubilat, Nat Brut, FIVE:2:ONE’s #thesideshow, and miscellaneous zines. Their other writings can be found in, or are forthcoming in, Bomb Magazine and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Their work will also be anthologized in Queer Voices: Prose, Poetry, and Pride, from Minnesota Historical Society Press. S. is currently the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle.

S. Brook Corfman is the author of Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the 2018 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize; in a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it “an extraordinary debut…a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.” Corfman is also the author of two chapbooks: the limited-edition letterpress Meteorites from DoubleCross Press and the digital collection of performance pieces The Anima from GaussPDF.