Green Light Books
Fort Greene: 686 Fulton Street
New York, NY 11217
United States
Virtual event. This event is free and open to the public.
Green Light will launch acclaimed emerging poet Ama Codjoe’s first full-length collection, Bluest Nude—hailed by Tracy K. Smith as “an ecstatic encounter.” “The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.” Shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, these poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. Codjoe joins us virtually with inimitable, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds for a virtual reading, conversation, and celebration not to be missed.
Ama Codjoe
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude. She is also the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Codjoe’s work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. She lives in New York City.
Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.