Wednesday, February 10, 2021
5:30 pm Central
Crowdcast

In celebration of Peter Gizzi’s new collection of poems, Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan University Press), Ocean Vuong will converse with Gizzi about poetry and death, beauty and sadness, grieving and light — and ultimately the elusive but very real edge of hope that can be found. Join us as two amazing practitioners of the lyric dive into the depths of what it means to be human at this precarious moment. Free to attend, registration required.

Books can be purchased during the event, or in advance here, from Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis; click the designated links below.

About the Authors

Peter Gizzi has published eight full-length collections of poetry, from 1998’s Artificial Heart (read the Rain Taxi review here!) to the 2016 National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, as well as numerous chapbooks and artists' books. Esteemed for how his “total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning” (Ben Lerner), Gizzi has also contributed to the poetry community via his groundbreaking literary magazine o-blek: a journal of language arts (1987-1993), his scholarship and editorial work on the Collected Poetry and Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, and as poetry editor for The Nation. Gizzi is the recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the University of Cambridge, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon, raised in Connecticut, and earned a BA at Brooklyn College. His loudly acclaimed books include the 2016 poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (read the Rain Taxi review here!) and the 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan, MacArthur, Whiting, and Poetry Foundations (among others) and of the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize (again among others), Vuong is also on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.