Join us in celebrating the launch of E.C. Belli’s Objects of Hunger, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Featuring readings from E.C. Belli, Jay Deshpande, Marina Blitshteyn, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Objects of Hunger explores in reflective, raw lyrics the dread and beauty of our inner worlds as expressed through our struggles against the self and the other. Each poem is a slender organism that speaks its own mind, unafraid of pathos; the emotions here have been tried on and lived in, and the work accrues, lyric after lyric, page after page. In the second section, World War I poems are broken down and dismantled, as the voices of that era’s poets meld with that of a postpartum mother, exposing a shared vernacular among these disparate experiences. Other poems in the collection explore the unraveling and entrapments of the domestic, but with tenacity in place of softness, using a lexicon gathered from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, among others.
E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was published in 2014, and The Nothing Bird, selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her work has been published in Verse, AGNI, and FIELD, among others. Her work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE.
Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger and The Rest of the Body (both from YesYes Books). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford.
Marina Blitshteyn is the author of Two Hunters, her first full-length collection, published by Argos Books this year with a CLMP Face-Out grant. Prior chapbooks include Russian for Lovers, Nothing Personal, $kill$ (read ‘skills’), and most recently Sheet Music. She lives and works in NYC.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest and being shortlisted for the National Book Award, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.