The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Brian Turner to discuss his three new poetry collections, The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, all released in 2023. Brian is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine.
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Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet, and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He’s the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the MFA program in Lake Tahoe and lives in Orlando, Florida.
About the Books
“Brian Turner’s The Wild Delight of Wild Things brought me to my knees, kissed the top of my head, and gently gave my heart back to me. What do we mean when we say we loved and lost someone? This profoundly beautiful book begins inside a life-changing relationship and extends with graceful tendrils out into the world, reminding us that by sharing our experiences we make an endless spiral form stretching out to everyone and everything. A tender heart curl. An epic love poem.” -Lidia Yuknavitch
Advanced praise for The Goodbye World Poem:
“Many things are sinking here-a whale, a shadow, a brother, a love. Sometimes it is just how we are feeling, sometimes it is true. Turner offers us poems of a very specific form of heartbreak, ‘all of it / gone now, submerged into something as simple / as the word after…’ Yet this heartbreak pulls us in, moment by moment, ‘moments / that gather into something / one might call a life.’ By the end, it’s an elegy for a person, but also for our lives. Beautiful.” -Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You
Advanced praise for The Dead Peasant’s Handbook:
“Brian Turner possesses the extraordinary capacity to transform grief into art, whether intimate or collective, immediate or historical, illuminating that anguish so that we may learn, survive, even flourish in its wake. . . . Everywhere there are the lessons of hidden history carved in images, as with ‘Vollum 14578,’ about a cruel anthrax experiment carried out on sheep. Yet, Turner believes in the redemptive power of love against death, demonstrated by the wrenching poem ‘Wedding Vows,’ and the refusal to speak the words ’till death do us part’ as part of those vows-a refusal only validated by death, since the love stubbornly refuses to die. Again and again, Brian Turner subjects his trauma to the demands of his craft, offering the gift of lyrical consolation even when that consolation is beyond the reach of the poet.” -Martín Espada
7 сен 2024
