Join us in celebrating the launch of Tomás Q. Morín’s new poetry collection, Patient Zero (Copper Canyon Press). With readings from Tomás and Elena Passarello.

Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero is full of life and its undeniable hungers. Claws, fins, mouths, and feathers populate a fanciful world: a man in a crowded market becomes a tree of butterflies, a mountain gives a feline yawn, grocery bags contain “milk for bones — salt for blood.” Meanwhile at the edge of the fantastic, realism beckons: the buzzard stalks the tortoise, heartbreak sickens the living, and each beginning contains an end.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Elena Passarello is the author of two collections of essays, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. Her essays on performance, pop, culture, and the natural world have recently appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction, she teaches at Oregon State University.