We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Claire, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This meeting will take place via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP becky@malvernbooks.com with “poetry book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or to make an appointment to visit.

On Saturday, April 24th, at 1pm we’ll be discussing Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.

Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection … possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words … There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”

* * *

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84143397219?pwd=dGdoWjRGaWIzc29ZRFZvQlk0WisxQT09

Meeting ID: 841 4339 7219
Passcode: 300443