Booksmith hosts a virtual event with Troy Jollimore (Earthly Delights) and Heather Altfeld (Post-Mortem). Join us!

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order the authors' books below and we'll ship them directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop):

• Earthly Delights by Troy Jollimore
• Post-Mortem by Heather Altfeld

We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.

About Earthly Delights by Troy Jollimore

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a new collection of philosophical, elegiac, and wry meditations on film, painting, music, and poetry itself.

Earthly Delights begins with an invocation to the muse and ends with the departure of Odysseus from Ithaca. In between, Troy Jollimore’s distinguished new collection ranges widely, with cinematic and adventurous poems that often concern artistic creation and its place in the world. A great many center on films, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The title poem reflects on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, while another is an elegy for Gord Downie, the lead singer and lyricist for the cult rock band The Tragically Hip. Other poems address various forms of political insanity, from the Kennedy assassination to today’s active shooter drills, and philosophical ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s musings on beauty to John D. Rockefeller’s thoughts on the relation between roses and capitalist ethics. The book’s longest poem, “American Beauty,” returns repeatedly to the film of that name, but ultimately becomes a meditation on the Western history of making and looking, and—like many of the book’s poems—an elegy for lost things.

Troy Jollimore's books of poetry are Syllabus of Errors, At Lake Scugog, and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006. His writings have appeared or will appear in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Best American Poetry 2020, the Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is also the author of several works of philosophy, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His fourth collection of poetry, Earthly Delights, will appear in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in September.

About Post-Mortem by Heather Altfeld

Spanning ages and species and cultures, Heather Altfeld's Post-Mortem pays tribute to the passing glory of this planet and all that our hands have made. These often long-form, expansive poems take many shapes and modes, including prose poem sequences, sestinas, kaddishes, and obituaries. No matter the form it inhabits, however, Altfeld's voice is unmistakable and one-of-a-kind. Whether considering mythical creatures, historical lives, or contemporary culture, Altfeld's poems are hilarious and deeply moving, somehow, at the same time.

Heather Altfeld is the author of The Disappearing Theatre, which won the 2016 Poets at Work Prize, selected by Stephen Dunn. She is the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Orion, Aeon, Narrative Magazine, The Georgia Review, ZYZZYVA, and Best American Essays. She lives in Northern California, where she teaches in the Comparative Religion and Humanities Department and the University Honors Program at California State University, Chico.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.