Booksmith is 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:

Underscore by Julie Carr

Whosoever Whole by Elizabeth Scanlon

Call This Mutiny by Craig Santos Perez

music from behind a stone wall by Steven Rood

b o y by Consuelo Wise

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

About Underscore by Julie Carr

Julie Carr’s deeply intimate collection, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac, tender, and at times erotic or bitter, these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living as well as the dead. Carr’s lyric poetry expresses the intricate many-layered relationships between individuals who are constantly shifting in their roles with one another. She considers otherness and nature while remaining deeply invested in human relationships and exploring the conflict of maintaining one’s own interiority amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.

Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”

Julie Carr is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Climate, cowritten with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; Someone Shot My Book; and 100 Notes on Violence. She lives in Denver where she teaches at the University of Colorado and helps run Counterpath, a press bookstore, gallery, and community garden space.

To have Underscore sent to your door, order here.

About Whosoever Whole by Elizabeth Scanlon

The poetry in Elizabeth Scanlon’s Whosoever Whole asks how we arrive at and nurture a sense of self amid a culture that wants us only to consume. Navigating the fractal and often fractured experiences of a citizen, a parent in the time of climate change, and a woman in an embattled era, Scanlon invites the reader into an interior space filled with anger, joy, wonder, and hope. Employing metaphor and metonymy, these poems portray a series of courageous portraits of the many faces a woman must wear to survive in today’s culture. Whosoever Whole is an anti-capitalist love song to all who refuse to be torn apart by the market valuation of their lives.

Elizabeth Scanlon is the author of Lonesome Gnosis and Odd Regard. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Boston Review, Bennington Review, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland. She is the editor-in-chief of the American Poetry Review and lives in Philadelphia. 

To have Whosoever Whole sent to your door, order here.

About Call This Mutiny by Craig Santos Perez

The seventh book from award-winning Chamoru author Craig Santos Perez, Call This Mutiny brings together poems that were originally published in journals and anthologies from 2008 to 2023. Throughout these selected poems, Perez offers critical explorations of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current home of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. Perez’s poetry draws on the power of storytelling to share Indigenous history and culture and to offer healing from the trauma of colonialism and injustice. As he writes, “If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.”

Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the coeditor of six anthologies; the author of poetry collections including Habitat Threshold and his ongoing from unincorporated territory series; and the author of the monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. He is professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. Perez has received the National Book Award for Poetry, American Book Award, Pen Center USA/Poetry Society of America Literary Prize, Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council Award, Nautilus Book Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs.

To have Call This Mutiny sent to your door, order here.

About music from behind a stone wall by Steven Rood

The poems in Steven Rood’s newest collection take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist who remains preoccupied with the tonalities of daily life. Each poem in music from behind a stone wall comes together to build a multi-layered symphony that reveals the delights and travails of family life and moments of intimate connection with animals and plants. At the core of the book are poems considering the overwhelming task of trying to communicate the essence of musical experience via the written word. This is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, vivid images, and formal variation.

Steven Rood is a practicing trial lawyer and poet living in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of Naming the Wind, also published by Omnidawn. His poems have been published in Periodicities, Sporklet, Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, Marlboro Review, Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere.

To have music from behind a stone wall sent to your door, order here.

About b o y by Conseuelo Wise

In this hybrid of lyric poetry and essay, Consuelo Wise utilizes repetition, fragmentation, and syntax to construct a form that repeatedly falls apart. Breaks in lines and fragmented stanzas are followed by accumulative rushes, slashes, brackets, and words pushed together.

Throughout this book-length poem, Wise composes a meditation and an investigation into loss and identity. Moving between sound and image, aggression and subtlety, b o y pries open memories that resist understanding but also refuse to be forgotten. Wise peels back layers of mourning, considering how it can be experienced as a personal, inherited, environmental, social, and historical phenomenon. Throughout, the protagonist in b o y reenvisions ways to process a great loss, listening closely and searching for words while “the earth is shaking and the silence is pressing down.” 

Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University in Oregon.

To have b o y to your door, order here.

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

Authors and books are pictured above as listed, clockwise (for books, from top left). Consuelo Wise is not pictured.