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Located in Chinatown, Manhattan, Yu and Me Books is a bookstore that showcases immigrant stories and creates a home for the community. It is the first female, Asian-American owned bookstore in New York City. The initials of the bookstore, YM, are the owner’s mother’s initials and represent the stories that have been passed down to them for generations.
In this Books Are Magic event, Karisma Price reads from her debut collection, I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023), and discusses the inspiration behind her work with poet Terrance Hayes. “As a poet, oddity is good,” says Price. For more from Price, read her installment of our Writers Recommend series.
P&T Knitwear is a family-owned independent bookstore, podcast studio, event space, and cafe in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The name dates back to the knitwear store the founder’s grandfather Hymie Tusk and his business partner Mike Pudlo started in 1952, after surviving the Holocaust and emigrating to New York City.
“I love to take an object made all but invisible by its mundanity—an egg-shaped container of pantyhose, a lawn chair turned on its side—and break it open to expose the full dimensions of the human vulnerability it carries,” writes Danielle Blau in her Craft Capsule essay “Somewhere Somebody Is Doing Something Right Now,” in which she explores how she creates characters for her poems. Write a poem that attempts to expose the full dimensions of an object and how it offers a reflection of a person, whether yourself or another character. What is the significance of this object and how does it exemplify human vulnerability?
“Everything you are afraid of will be surpassed by desires you cannot yet imagine.” —Elizabeth Metzger, Lying In
The author of peep considers the ecstatic freedom of writing poetry.
“For me, poetry is the act of paying attention. It pushes me to pay attention to a moment, a feeling, an idea, an image.” Clint Smith speaks about what poetry means to him, the themes in his new collection, Above Ground (Little, Brown, 2023), and reads his poem “All at Once” in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
“What I adore is not horses, with their modern / domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore / is a bug that lives only one day,” writes Natalie Shapero in her poem “Not Horses,” published in the November 2013 issue of Poetry magazine. Shapero redirects the reader from horses to the short lifespan of a bug within the first few lines of the poem and in doing so creates a humorous tension between the title and the body of the poem that adds character to the unique speaker. This week write a poem that moves quickly from one subject to the next. Consider how your mind shifts from one thought to another and carry that tone forward into the poem.
“It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave.” In this video from the 2014 National Book Award finalists reading, Louise Glück reads her poem “An Adventure,” which appears in her National Book Award–winning collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
The author of peep offers an exercise in negative capability.
