Booksmith and The Bindery are pleased to host a virtual event with Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will be reading from their work. Be the first to own these new treasures:

Often, Common, Some, and Free by Samuel Amadon

If This Makes You Nervous by Elena Karina Byrne

Train Music by C.S. Giscombe and Judith Margolis

Interventions for Women by Angela Hume

Gut by Amanda Larson

Earth on Earth by Bin Ramke

Genghis Chan on Drums by John Yau

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

About Often, Common, Some, and Free by Samuel Amadon

This is a book about transformation. Moving across varied formal and aesthetic terrains, these poems take on the subject of change, considering the construction and demolition of buildings, roaming between cities, and drawing together an image of a world in flux. The speaker is in movement--walking, flying, swimming, and taking the train, while also constantly twisting in his sentences, turning into different versions of himself, and braiding his voice with others. These poems take on subjects that encompass creation and loss from Robert Moses's career transforming the cityscape of New York to the robbery of works from Boston's Gardner Museum. But, ultimately, these poems aim to resist destruction, to focus on the particular, and to hold still their world and their ever-shifting speaker.

Samuel Amadon is the author of Like a Sea, The Hartford Book, and Listener. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Lana Turner. He is the winner of the 2013 Believer Poetry Book Award, and he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of South Carolina. With Liz Countryman, he edits the poetry journal Oversound.

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About If This Makes You Nervous by Elena Karina Byrne

Elena Karina Byrne's fourth collection of poems offers what she describes as an homage to her art-immersed upbringing with poems that challenge perception as they create a dialogue between the speaker and sixty-six artists. Lyrical narratives unfold with psychological urgency and candor as they re-encounter each artist's unique oeuvre. The poems are as political as they are personal, mapping out the author's emotional, spatial, and gender orientations within the confines of our visual culture.Longing and loss prevail in If This Makes You Nervous, always leading the reader on winding paths that return to the bodily while balancing beauty and terror and what is seen and what remains invisible. If This Makes You Nervous is a devotional look at shifting identity that begins in a preteen's memory, moves through history's collective body, and ends with what is "connected and accounted for" in the imagination's relativistic measure of time.

Elena Karina Byrne is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. A Pushcart Prize recipient, her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews can be found in POETRY, Kyoto Journal, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Volt, APR, Poetry International, Poetry Daily, Narrative, Denver Quarterly, Plume, LARB, BOMB, and elsewhere. Elena is completing a book of short stories, screenplay, and her “interrupted essays,” Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire. Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, 2016-2018 Kate and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards judge, Elena is a private editor, freelance lecturer, 24-year Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for the historic Ruskin Art Club.

To have If This Makes You Nervous sent to your door, order here.

About Train Music by C.S. Giscombe and Judith Margolis

Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing "studios" where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times.Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed--and in the months afterwards--the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century's racial and gendered conflicts--sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a "mixed economy" of poetry and prose.

C. S. Giscombe’s poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his book of linked essays (concerning Canada, race, and family) is Into and Out of Dislocation. His recognitions include the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award (for Prairie Style) and the Carl Sandburg Prize (for Giscome Road). Ohio Railroads (a poem in essay form) was published in 2014 and Border Towns (essays on poetry, color, nature, television, etc.) appeared in 2016. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a long-distance cyclist.

Artist/essayist, Judith Margolis explores tensions between social consciousness, feminism, and religious traditions. “Life Support Invitation to Prayer,” was published by Penn State Press/Graphic Medicine Series. “Countdown to Perfection Meditations on the Sefirot” was published by Bright Idea Books /Jerusalem. Margolis is Art Editor of NASHIM Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (U of Indiana Press). Collections include NY Public Library, Yale, Univ. of Washington, UCLA, and Jaffe Book Arts Center. She does collage because bringing together unrelated images to form something new is how humans dream.

To have Train Music sent to your door, order here.

About Interventions for Women by Angela Hume

Were you raised to be a girl? The kind of girl who grows up to be a woman? Were you shamed for being not girl enough or too much girl? Were you looked at, talked over, touched, fed, psychiatrized, or indoctrinated in ways you didn’t want to be or didn’t understand? Were you told that if you’d just smile and try to be happy, everything would be better? At a certain point, did you look around and start to see how big the system is that holds you, a system that wants to use you up, along with everyone and everything around you? Did you start to see how it uses you in order to use others, and how you suffer as a consequence of that use while also benefiting from it? Did you start to see how complicit you are in every part of it? Are you sick, grieving, furious, on fire? Did you answer yes to some of these questions? To none of them? Then this book is for you. I wrote this book for you.

Angela Hume is the author of the full-length poetry book Middle Time (Omnidawn, 2016). Her chapbooks include Meat Habitats (DoubleCross, 2019), Melos (Projective Industries, 2015), The Middle (Omnidawn, 2013), and Second Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). With Gillian Osborne, she co-edited Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa Press, 2018). Angela is at work on a nonfiction book about the feminist self-help movement in the Bay Area (AK Press, 2022/23).

To have Interventions for Women sent to your door, order here.

About Gut by Amanda Larson

Amanda Larson's Gut begins with an epigraph from Frank O'Hara: "Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you." From there, Larson launches an unflinching interrogation of how a young woman maintains agency in the wake of trauma, violence, and desire. Larson spins a conversation between works of feminist theory--including the those of Cathy Caruth, Susan Bordo, Patricia Hill Collins, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, and bell hooks--and her own experiences. The book moves through Larson's recovery while questioning the limits of the very term and of language as a whole. She employs a variety of different forms, including prose, Q&A poems, and a timeline, reflecting both the speaker's obsession with control and her growing willingness to let it go. With a measured voice, Larson finds a path for how to move beyond logic during processes of trauma and recovery.Gut won the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest, selected by Jericho Brown.

Amanda Larson is a writer from New Jersey, and a graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California. Her writing has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, and other publications. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at New York University.

To have Gut to your door, order here.

About Earth on Earth by Bin Ramke

A kind of translation of the thousand-year-old poem "Earth Took of Earth," this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both the danger of and the consolation given by earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, echoes Ramke's attempts to understand damages done to and celebrate the facts of earth--for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so powerfully recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is also a play on the phrase "heaven on earth," turning this idea around and encouraging us to instead turn our hopes toward earth on earth.

Bin Ramke’s first book was a Yale Younger Poets selection. Since then he has published a dozen more, as well as having edited over eighty books for a university press. He was editor of the Denver Quarterly for some twenty years and has taught at Columbus State University in Georgia, the University of Denver, and on occasion since 1999 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to write, teach, and live in Denver with Linda and Nic.

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About Genghis Chan on Drums John Yau

At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.

John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign (2020) and Bijoux in the Dark (2018). In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, which is devoted to publishing poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism, and in 2012, he co-founded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize. His writing has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean. He teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) and lives in New York.

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

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