Book Talk! Shelley Wong's As She Appears,w/ Taneum Bambrick & Blas Falconer

133 North Larchmont Boulevard,Los Angeles CA 90004

16 May, 2022

Description

A poetry reading for the debut of AS SHE APPEARS by Shelley Wong. Vaccination or recent (within 3 days) Negative Covid-19 test checked at the door. Masks Required. ABOUT THE BOOK Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are. ABOUT THE POETS Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco. Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Failure, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. His poems have been featured by Poetry, Harvard Review, and The New York Times, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and Poets and Writers. He is a poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. www.blasfalconer.com Taneum Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press Sept 2022) and Vantage, which won the 2019 American Poetry Review First Book Award. Her work can be found in The Nation,The New Yorker, PEN, and elsewhere. A 2020 Stegner Fellow, she is currently a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California. Notes on parking in Larchmont Village: Chevalier's does not have any parking, but there is paid meter parking on the street, a paid lot next to the bank, and free street parking parallel the Larchmont Blvd. on Lucerne Blvd.