Quiet Lightning is pleased to host a virtual event with Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will read from their work. Hosted by QL director Evan Karp.

** Please note, this event begins at 1pm Pacific Standard Time **

Be among the first to own these new treasures:

Oyster Saloon by Desirée Alvarez

Divers by Samuel Amadon

The Gathering by Sherah Bloor

Silicon Ana: A Quantum Entanglement by Jennifer Hasegawa

Memory of a Larger Mind by Daniela Naomi Molnar

Sentience by Meredith Stricker

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

About Oyster Saloon by Desirée Alvarez

This collection charts the life of an artist and her passion for nature through the making of a painting. Poems revel in the space humans occupy within the natural world, considering ways of living that range from harmonious to extractive. Alvarez reflects on petroleum, plastic, robots, monsters, and a swath of art history and family history—from her Latino father’s time working as an artist in Andy Warhol’s Factory to the teachings of Hokusai. Acting asa séance conjuring the voices of the dead as a guide, the book is part elegy to the poet’s mother, who was a painter and gardener. Steeped in the rural New England countryside of the poet’s childhood and the lore of her indigenous ancestral family in Puerto Rico and Mexico, Oyster Saloon straddles contrasting heritage and landscapes and considers what it means to live a creative life.

Desirée Alvarez is the author of Raft of Flame, winner of the 2020 Lake Merritt Poetry Prize from Omnidawn, and Devil’s Paintbrush, which received the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She has published in journals including Boston Review, Fence Magazine, and Poetry Magazine, along with many anthologies. Alvarez is also a painter exhibiting in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and she lives in New York City, where she teaches at New York City College of Technology and The Juilliard School.

To have Oyster Saloon sent to your door, order here.

About Divers by Samuel Amadon

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker’s impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon’s poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.

Samuel Amadon is the author of five books of poetry, including Listener and Often, Common, Some, And Free. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Nation, Lana Turner, Volt, Fence, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina, where, with Liz Countryman, he edits the journal Oversound.

To have Divers sent to your door, order here.

About The Gathering, by Sherah Bloor

Named for a sura of the Quran, The Gathering is an epic in cantos that indiscriminately records deeds and events that have taken place on this earth. Its speaker—a nearly omniscient archivist—is propelled by a force more elemental than causation to visit moments and subjects, moving swiftly through thoughts, physiologies, and environments. Under an imperative to record everything encountered—however small, cruel, or sad—the archivist must grant radically equal weight to each thing. Yet as these entries accumulate, a strange significance accrues, and the negligible seems necessary. Each mundane fragment of life finds consolation. What was, was; what happened, got to happen.

Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. She is coeditor and co-translator, with Tayseer Abu Odeh, of You Must Live: New Poems from Palestine. She is editor-in-chief of the literary and arts magazine, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, and her poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

To have The Gathering sent to your door, order here.

About Silicon Ana: A Quantum Entanglement by Jennifer Hasegawa

In Silicon Ana: A Quantum Entanglement, two narratives weave across each page: Ana, a stigmatic visionary navigating miraculous healings and supernatural visitations, and Nan, discovering sexuality and selfhood through a found Penthouse magazine. Across seven movements, their stories braid and diverge—hospital beds mirror bedroom paralysis, religious ecstasy meets erotic awakening, strange prophecies echo in both realms. Through tightly wound five-line stanzas, this double helix of consciousness explores possession in all its forms: spiritual, sexual, psychological, and technological. Each stanza creates a chamber where sacred and profane collapse into each other. Written in an era of AI awakening and quantum computing, where consciousness becomes suspect, this collection asks what happens when the experiment becomes self-aware. As Ana ascends toward cosmic transcendence and Nan navigates earthly desire, their entangled fates ask if we are observing one entity being split across an unfathomable divide or two that are bound by invisible threads. Silicon Ana is a fevered meditation on bodies that refuse singular interpretation in an age of infinite possible selves.

Jennifer Hasegawa is a poet and community archivist. She is the author of the experimental anti-memoir NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire and the poetry collection La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Her work has been published in Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, jubilat, takahe, Tule Review, and Vallum, among others. Born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, she currently lives in San Francisco.

To have Silicon Ana sent to your door, order here.

About Memory of a Larger Mind by Daniela Naomi Molnar

In her new poetry collection, Memory of a Larger Mind, Daniela Naomi Molnar sifts through memory and layered loss—planetary, cultural, familial, and personal—asking how we withstand and how we transform. These are plein air poems, written outdoors in the presence of disappearing glaciers and composed with shifting light, wind, sound, and scent: elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments. Braiding the slow death of glaciers with her grandmother’s survival of the Holocaust, the book holds ecological and ancestral loss in a single frame. Alive to our current moment while keeping one foot in geologic time, Molnar exposes genocide and ecocide as expressions of the same logic, the same movement: ice to water to light, grief to love to joy to grief.

Memory of a Larger Mind is part of a larger interdisciplinary project that gathers pigments, language, and memory from “sacrifice zones”—glaciated landscapes, former concentration and incarceration camps, desecrated sacred sites—and transforms them into poems, paintings, and films. The result is work in which all bodies are understood as dynamic, part of a world in which difficult pasts might open toward more peaceful futures, and in which grief, handled with care, might shift to love.

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her art centers on memory—planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. She works with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters such as rainwater and glacial melt; her poems and essays are created alongside the visual art; the practices overlap and influence each other. Her debut book CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, followed by PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where the forest meets the city.

To have Memory of a Larger Mind sent to your door, order here.

About Sentience by Meredith Stricker

With this collection, poet and artist Meredith Stricker considers questions about personhood, belonging, property, and ownership within interdependent living cultural systems. Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens. The poems track bee swarms and hazardous waste, separation walls, and diatoms. They are intently visual, aural, and spatial, tracing the dendritic forms of trees and fractal coastlines and the symmetries of biomorphic animal patterns. They highlight non-artificial, non-extractive intelligences in sharp contrast to the rise of AI. Informed by biosemiotics, SENTIENCE arises from Stricker’s continuing multidisciplinary work and architectural habitat restoration in Big Sur and her performance collaborations with musicians, composers, artists, and beekeepers.

Meredith Stricker is the author of six poetry collections, including REWILD, winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize; Our Animal, winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Award; Tenderness Shore, winner of the National Poetry Series Award; and anemochore, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize and finalist for the Poetry Society of America Four Quartets Award. Her work involves performance, paint, drawing, graphic overlays and hybrid forms of documentary/lyric exploring a sentient world through media ranging from artist books to buildings. As an artist, designer and poet, she co-directs poetics + space, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur, along with projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms.

To have Sentience sent to your door, order here.

--

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

Authors and books are pictured above as listed, clockwise from top left.