with special guests Paula Cisewski and Juliet Patterson
Friday, April 15, 7 pm
The Club Room at Red Stag Supper Club
509 1st Ave NE, Minneapolis

Join us as we celebrate the release of Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, a go-for-broke collection of "small, highly polished jewels that together form an intricate mosaic” (Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review). Out on April 7 from Nightboat Books, Proxies is already one of the most talked about books of the year by people in the know (see blurbs below). Joining the Arizona-based Blanchfield at this event will be two acclaimed Minnesota poets, Juliet Patterson and Paula Cisewski, each of whom has a new chapbook of nonfiction drawn from a full-length work in progress; the trio will discuss why poets are increasingly creating some of the best nonfiction out there.

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale at this event, and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

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What people are saying about Proxies:

"Proxies: Essays Near Knowing brings a slowed-to-meaning lens to the remembered moments of a life. Blanchfield’s readers wander into his ordinary-extraordinary quotidian—the vulnerable longing of a singular voice expressing a peopled intelligence. Not since Hilton Als’ White Girls have I read anything as interrogative, unsettling, and brilliant."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric

“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"Excellent....a book of dynamic, thoughtful, and flat-out moving essays. These proxies are short but extremely sticky. They stuck with me. I’m carrying them with me as I write this sentence. I think you’re going to want to get sticky too."—Ander Monson, BOMB Magazine

Brian Blanchfield is the author of two collections of poetry: Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004) and A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry and prose have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Chicago Review, BOMB, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, among other journals and magazines. Born in Winston-Salem, NC, he has worked in the editorial department of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and taught creative writing and literature at the Pratt Institute of Art, the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he was the Richard Hugo Writer in Residence. Since 2010 he has been a poetry editor of Fence, and he is a guest editor of the PEN Poetry Series for the year beginning September 2015. With his partner John, he lives out past the streetlights in Tucson, where he teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona; produces and hosts Speedway and Swan, a poetry and music show; and runs the Intermezzo reading series.

Paula Cisewski's third poetry collection, The Threatened Everything, will be released later this year; her previous collection, Ghost Fargo, was selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Cisewski’s new chapbook of lyric prose, Misplaced Sinister, explores family relationships, mythology, and cultural systems of punishment, using poetic sensibilities to amplify a highly charged narrative.

Juliet Patterson’s The Truant Lover was the winner of the first Nightboat Books Poetry Prize in 2006; her new collection of poetry, Threnody, is forthcoming in October from Nightboat as well. Patterson’s brand-new chapbook, Epilogue, presents a long sequence from a memoir in progress; the work of a poet rooted in image and deeply attuned to the natural world, Epilogue is by turns stark and unflinching as it documents the silence that descends around a suicide and envelopes its survivors.