Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Luiza Flynn-Goodlett's debut full-length collection of poems Look Alive. She'll be joined for a group reading by K-Ming Chang, Alicia Mountain, Arhm Choi Wild & Meg Day.

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

You can order Look Alive here – we're currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

Please note that this event will include ASL interpretation and auto-generated live captioning. If you have any questions or additional special needs, do not hesitate to email [email protected] and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you.

About the book

Look Alive documents the construction of a queer femme self in the hostile territory of American late capitalism. Its speaker encounters darkness—in the form of violence perpetrated by both individuals and by societal systems of power and oppression—and yet, rejects the narratives articulated by that violence, celebrating instead softness and gentleness, and ultimately, cleaving to the natural world in all its radiant, mysterious queerness.

“This is a book composed of poems shaped like doors, trapdoors, and gates, and rightly so. They offer us entry to the sublime, to the kind of aliveness only accessible by passing through death where blooms are “bruises / both faded and freshly made” and “though the heart thuds with lack. / lack, lack,” it flowers. These are lean, meticulously curated poems that nonetheless let so much in; loss, embodiment, injury, victimization, witnessed and voiced. “What chafes,” Flynn-Goodlett writes, “life / to light.” This lifting into the light—one of the most crucial functions of the lyric poem—allows for a survival “half-forgotten as / tampons at the bottom of a purse. / saying you’ve bled, still bleed, live.” Look Alive finally does not simply look alive. It lives. It aims a flashlight at my own dark corners. It sisters me.” – Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

About the authors

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett previously published six chapbooks, most recently Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize, and Tender Age, winner of the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Prize. Her poetry can be found in TriQuarterly, Third Coast, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Foglifter in sunny Oakland, California.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House). More of her writing can be found online at kmingchang.com.

Alicia Mountain is the 2020–2021 Artist in Residence in the Department of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is a lesbian poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Mountain won the Iowa Poetry Prize with her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018). She is also the author of Thin Fire, a digital chapbook published by BOAAT Press. Mountain earned an MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula and her PhD at the University of Denver. She is based in New York. 

Arhm Choi Wild is a queer, Korean-American poet who grew up in the slam community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to perform across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, and Asheville Wordfest. Their debut book of poems, CUT TO BLOOM, was the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Book Contest. Arhm is a Kundiman fellow with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019. They have been anthologized in Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures, and their work appears in Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock, and other publications. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and as a Diversity Coordinator at a school in New York City. For more information, visit arhmchoiwild.com. 

Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, & elsewhere. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College. www.megday.com

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