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Wednesday, November 17 at 7PM pt
AND HAUNT THE WORLD by Flower Conroy & Donna Spruijt-Metz
MOTHER/LAND by Ananda Lima
AN INSOMNIAC’S SLUMBER PARTY WITH MARILYN MONROE by Heidi Seaborn
ABOUT THE BOOKS
Heidi Seaborn’s astonishing second collection of poems, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a middle-of-the-night poetic conversation with Marilyn Monroe that explores obsessions, addictions, abuse, objectification, marriage, work, children, childlessness and death. Pressing on the themes of her acclaimed debut, Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}, Seaborn illuminates the biographical and emotional journey of Marilyn as intimacies whispered between two women. These are women who have lived “on the glittering edge” and know that when a third husband “draws a blank page from his typewriter,” it means she needs to go to work in a world dominated by men. In An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a resilient, intelligent feminist who understands how to accumulate and wield power in the 1950’s. She is also vulnerable, exploited, and broken in so many ways. We see the speaker discover Marilyn until “then she is everywhere,” a haunting presence that becomes both muse and reflection. Seaborn invites us into the poetic soul of the world’s most famous woman with poems that celebrate and mourn. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a sequined meditation on what keeps us up at night and what fills our dreams.
Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.
And Haunt the World is a micro-chapbook is a part of the 2021 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series. All donations made for this title will go directly to the author.
DONNA SPRUIJT-METZ
Author
Donna Spruijt-Metz is Professor of Psychology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California, and a MacDowell fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as the Los Angeles Review, Copper Nickel, RHINO, and Poetry Northwest. She is the author of “Slippery Surfaces” (Finishing Line Press) and co-author, with Flower Conroy, of And Haunt the World (Ghost City Press). https://www.donnasmetz.com
FLOWER CONROY
Author
LGBTQ+ writer, NEA Fellow and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s first full-length manuscript, “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” won the Stevens Manuscript Competition;
her second collection, "A Sentimental Hairpin"; is forthcoming from Tolsun Books. Her poetry will or has appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review and others. She is co-author, with Donna Spruijt-Metz, of And Haunt the World (Ghost City Press).
ANANDA LIMA
Author
Ananda Lima’s work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, The Common, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press - INCH micro-chapbook series). She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
HEIDI SEABORN
Author
Heidi Seaborn is author of the acclaimed Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} and Comstock Chapbook 2020 prize winning Bite Marks. She’s won or been shortlisted for dozens of awards and her work has been widely published. She’s the Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. www.heidiseabornpoet.com