Rivka Clifton, Caleb True, & Katie Lee Ellison

About this event

Seattle poet and artist Rivka Clifton and writer and editor Caleb True present their new books Wrong Feast and RAÑA. They will be joined by writer and creator of Nonfiction for No Reason, Katie Lee Ellison. Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you'd like to RSVP, please do so here! About Wrong Feast "Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream-meets another—this is the landscape where these poems unfold," Kathryn Nuernberger writes of Rivka Clifton's, Wrong Feast. Indeed, in Cliftons’ second full-length collection, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry engaging Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.” Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny — a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head is deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone is birthed into a crib. . . Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention, while fully considering the ambiguities and the possibilities within Clifton’s creations. These are not merely poems of action and consequence, but ones of call and response. They will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails. They are the entrails. About RAÑA RAÑA spirals outward from the blood, sweat, and heat of the boxing ring where Eugenio Rafael Raña takes on any opponent in Villa Ocho. In every match, he is again a soldier in the Falklands (Malvinas) War, battling alongside his Argentinian countrymen and hell-bent on victory. Inside the ring, he envisions himself a heavyweight phenom punishing his British foes with haymakers. Outside the ring, Raña spends his days in the hinterlands of Argentina, drinking and looking for his next fight. Rewinding, pausing, fast-forwarding—he replays VHS tapes of professional boxing matches, as he does his memories of the war, searching for a win. RAÑA is a phantasmagoria of modern war, brutal defeat, and a lifelong anguish that endures. Rivka Clifton is the author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press), Wrong Feast (Baobab Press), Extended Cut (forthcoming Fonograf Editions) as well as the chapbooks: Action (Split/Lip Press), MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press), A Feast of Small Proportions (Fork Apple Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Revie w, Ploughshares, and other magazines. Caleb True is a writer, editor, critic, musician, athlete, and podcaster. He holds an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. He is the author of the critical essay On Ruben Slikk: A Manifesto on the Purpose of Art and the Value of Transgression (Dynamo Verlag 2024), and Chansons Russes (Quetzalcoatl 2016, Dynamo Verlag 2023), an historical triptych of stories set in Soviet Russia. He has published short stories and essays in Ploughshares, The Sonora Review, Faultline, Yemassee, Whiskey Island, and many others. He is the founder and managing editor of Dynamo Verlag (est. 2015), a boutique publishing house specializing in textual work demonstrating genius, eclecticism, and originality. Katie Lee Ellison created the Seattle-based international literary event series, Nonfiction for No Reason. You can find her column of author interviews and culture writing in The Stranger, and essays in Shenandoah, The Seventh Wave, J Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a contributing editor at Moss Literary Journal, and her memoir has been supported by the Sewanee Writers Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tin House/MWC Oregon Summer Workshop, and Hugo House.

Who

• Rivka CliftonAuthor
• Caleb TrueAuthor

Books

• Wrong FeastRivka Clifton
• RAÑACaleb True

Venue

Comstock's Bindery & Bookshop

WA

Venue website

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