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.

Be among the first to own these new treasures:

en el norte / soy del sur, by José Felipe Alvergue

Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers: New & Selected by Cal Bedient

WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED, by John Cross

Las Palmas, by Keith Jones

PULSE, by Maria Nazos

THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD, by L.M. Rivera

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

About en el norte / soy del sur by José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue’s en el norte/soy del sur, which translates to “in the north I am of the south,” is an exploration into the limits of the American sonnet, one that seeks to establish a stable sense of place, while opening vistas at each turn. Stitching together multiple sonnets into what he calls “sonnet essays,” Alvergue rides their turns—or “voltas”—that are guided by memories and photographs of his family’s migratory history between El Salvador and the United States.

The resulting text is a story of human geography that considers the coordinates of a long, continuous thought about what it means to be “of a place” as a defining characteristic of identity, when one is also “in a place” that sets strict limits on the political and historical potential of im/migrants. A deeply human documentary work that delves into one family’s migration across the hemisphere, en el norte/soy del sur hopes to give shape to the collective and often amorphous history of migration in the face of narratives that peddle spectacularized distillation and essentialism.

José Felipe Alvergue is the author of four books, including his work of autotheory purplish: poetry anger publics and the poetry collections scenery and precis, the latter of which was also published by Omnidawn.

To have en el norte / soy del sur sent to your door, order here.

About Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers: New & Selected by Cal Bedient

The poems in Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers speak to the emotionally and existentially tough challenge presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy: “It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task.”Filled with wit, color, and high-spirited invention, these selected poems offer no room for softness and sentiment. They carry variant voices, whispers like dramatic asides, and mind-expanding assertions as they reveal their layers and nuances. Bedient confronts disasters of politics, love, and faithless time, never turning away from the glinting axe.

This collection also includes new poems that are direct in dealing with the difficulties of keeping faith through life. They recognize that making something—for instance, poetry—is necessary to coach the world into realness and render oneself real in the process, a journey of both intensive investigation and creativity.

Calvin Bedient is professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles, is a founding editor of the New California Poetry series, and co-edits Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion. He is the author of several collections of criticism, including Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and its Protagonist, and The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion in addition to the poetry collections Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, and The Multiple. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

To have Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers sent to your door, order here.

About WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED, by John Cross

John Cross’s WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED opens in exile and st(r)ays there. The character Mathias, a trickster who opens this collection, wakes with a primal utterance and startled vision born of commotion. Bewildered by the noise of our culture, he finds brief glimpses of meaning in fleeting, slippery moments. Mathias navigates life in exile, exploring the depths of his situation through the beat of his song and stutter, which manifests in a deranging of language and finds a foothold in cosmic disorder. A “scavenger for armor” in a world of loss and wreckage, he feels the terror of existence while holding onto the promise of a “breath still audible at near dark.”

The second half of the book opens in the harsh light of a sun that “pushes down on our feet” and implores that we witness our world. In this brightness, Cross conjures shadows from his own memory and confronts a world where a president throws “his people to the wolves.” These poems move through the world in wonder, offering an elegiac hushed prayer to all that we are losing in a changing environment, to “the oriole ascending / the palo verde of bee vibration . . . & Mitchell’s satyr butterfly.”

WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Open Contest, selected by Maw Shein Win.

John Cross is the author of the chapbook staring at the animal, and his work was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has appeared in Volt, Lana Turner, Yalobusha Review, and New American Writing, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

To have WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED sent to your door, order here.

About Las Palmas, by Keith Jones

The poems of Las Palmas conjure, walk beside, and tarry with the entangled grief of the long histories and violences in which we are all still embedded. Jones offers homage to the anguished beauties and truths that poet Jay Wright once said were “the disturbances” that “our ancestors create in us.” Grounded in musicality and haptics, Las Palmas seeks to salvage and mend while meditating on materiality, loss, cartography, kinship, displacement, coloniality, the “modern” world, and climate disasters. Throughout this collection, Keith Jones finds truth and community amid despair and the cruelest of circumstances, working through traumatic intimacies and mapping new imaginaries.

Las Palmas is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, selected by Brody Parrish Craig.

Keith Jones (he/him) is the author of Echo’s Errand and the chapbooks blue lake of tensile fire; shorn ellipses; the lucid upward ladder; Fugue Meadow; and Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Harvard Review, SX Salon, Transition, Verse, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and is the current poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory.

To have Las Palmas sent to your door, order here.

About PULSE, by Maria Nazos

The poems of PULSE look deeply into a troubled world, inspecting what makes us suffer and demonstrating how we overcome difficulties. PULSE interrogates painful losses of friends to cancer, harmful politics, hate crimes, and mass shootings, including the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub. Maria Nazos examines the life force that continues to pulse relentlessly through a fragmented world, that enables us to flow, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks to Midwestern plains and a Tampa nightclub, the collection moves through madness, redemption, and love.

Maria Nazos is the author of A Hymn that Meanders and Still Life. Her poetry and translations have been published in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, Columbia Review, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump.

To have PULSE sent to your door, order here.

About THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD, by L.M. Rivera

LM Rivera’s THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD is a poetic autobiography seen through the lens of literature, cinema, theory, history, mythology, and demonology. Presenting themselves in a sort of kinship with academic traditions, these poems move beyond scholarly preciousness to uncover something deeper, stranger, and more honest. This collection is a descent into an absurdist avant-garde performance, immersing the reader in the head of “red” experiences—those with sensations of extremity, despair, amusement, and derision. Here we find a heart laid bare through poetry that aims for the deadliest parts and dances wildly along the way.

LM Rivera is a writer and coeditor of Called Back Books. His work has been published in numerous journals and magazines, and he is the author of Against Heidegger, The Little Legacies, and The Drunkards. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

To have THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD sent 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, each row from left to right.