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John Freeman, Natalie Shapero, and Tayi Tibble Read at Diesel Bookstore
October 27, 2022 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm PDT
From the Organizers:
Join us on Thursday October 27th at 6:30pm as we welcome John Freeman, Tayi Tibble and Natalie Shapero to the store to read from and sign Wind, Trees and other selected works.
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, the literary annual of new writing, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His work includes the poetry collections Maps and The Park, the book-length essay Dictionary of the Undoing, and several anthologies, among them Tales of Two Americas, a volume on inequality in America, Tales of Two Planets, which examines the climate crisis globally, and There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, coedited by Tracy K. Smith, a portrait of the United States on the cusp of revolution, climate crisis, and the upheavals of a pandemic. His work has been translated into over twenty languages, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and ZYZZYVA. The former editor of Granta, he teaches at NYU and hosts the California Book Club, a monthly discussion of a book from California for Alta Journal.
In Wind, Trees, John Freeman presents a meditation on power and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the wind, and cannot possibly carry all we’ve been handed? Offering a stark moral critique of pandemic self-preservation—as “justifications grew / with greed like vines / up the side of a tree / taking everything”—Wind, Trees joins the ranks of politically urgent yet timeless collections like The Lice by W.S. Merwin. Through narrative lyric and metaphysical pulse, meandering thought and punctuating quiet, Freeman studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.
Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. Her second book of poetry, Rangikura, will be published in the United States in 2023.
Poukahangatus, the American debut of an acclaimed young poet as she explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation
Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Popular Longing. Her previous collections are Hard Child, shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and No Object, winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at UC Irvine.
The poems of Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers―be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. “Why even / look up, when all we’ll see is people / looking down?” In a world where everyone has to answer to someone, it seems no one is equipped to disrupt the status quo, and how the most urgent topics of conversation can only be approached through refraction.