In association with Bat City Review, join us in celebrating the launch of Susan Briante’s new poetry collection, The Market Wonders. Susan will be joined by writers Rebecca Liu, Corey Miller, and Maya Perez.
In The Market Wonders, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. . . . Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet’s consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains “I wish more poets would write about money,” and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about The Market Wonders, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world.
Photo of Susan Briante: Cybele Knowles
Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. Of Utopia Minus, Publisher’s Weekly declared: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.” Briante also writes essays on documentary poetics as well as on the relationship between place and cultural memory. Some of these can be found in Creative Non-Fiction, Rethinking History, Jacket2 and The Believer. Her poems and essays been collected in the anthologies The Force of What’s Possible, The Volta Book of Poets, Devouring the Green, The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem.
A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.
Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture. New work has been published in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Guernica and The Progressive. Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, affect theory, and translation. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona.
Rebecca Liu is a third year poet at the Michener Center for Writers. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast.
Corey Miller was born in southern Illinois and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.
Maya Perez is a screenwriter and fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Masters Review and Electric Literature and she is co-editor of the books On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft and the upcoming On Story: Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, both from University of Texas Press. Maya is also a producer for the Emmy Award-winning television series On Story: Presented by Austin Film Festival, now in its sixth season on PBS. She is a graduate of Vassar College and the Michener Center for Writers.