Join us for an afternoon with Lisa Russ Spaar, who will read from her new poetry collection, Soul Cake. A conversation with Kaitlyn Airy will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Like a magical hybrid of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joni Mitchell, Lisa Russ Spaar has been moving readers for decades with her poetry, which is at once ornate and primordial, salty and devotional.
Soul Cake, her wintry seventh collection, takes its title from a centuries-old wassailer’s carol and leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s essential subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, these poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis. Full of yearning and flickers of cheer, they “throw in a fist of saffron for the dying sun,” finding what warmth and light they can in times of cold and lengthening dark.
About the Author: Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of fifteen books, including four poetry anthologies and a collection of essays about poetry, and most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel. A finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she directed the MFA Program for many years.
About the Moderator: Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet and essayist. Her work explores international adoption, American labor history, ecological precarity, the Korean War, and the rupture that continues in its wake. Raised on a small island in the Salish Sea, she currently lives in Charlottesville where she serves as a research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia. Her work is found in FENCE, Poets.org, Poetry Online, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. In her spare time she enjoys consulting the oracle, tracking down patches of ghost pipes, and experimenting with fermentation.
