April 7th
7pm
Uterotopia by Rachel Galvin. With lyric intensity, wordplay, and dark humor, Uterotopia explores sexism and aging, fertility and mortality, the bystander effect, and violence against women on an intimate and national level. In poems that converse with writers including César Vallejo, Kim Hyesoon, and W.H. Auden, urban legends and folk rituals interweave with facts, anecdotes, and news items.
Date of Birth by Shawn R. Jones. The poems in this bracing debut do not shy away from incomprehensible tragedies: racism, poverty, abuse, and addiction, incest, and infidelities of the body and mind. Yet the world depicted by Shawn R. Jones has moments of humor and playfulness—for example, in a litany of indelible nicknames of the members of her childhood cohort in Atlantic City. If Date of Birth is heart-wrenching in its journalistic reporting of suffering, it is also a testament to the strength and resilience of the figures it portrays.
McNally Jackson would like to dedicate tonight's event to the wonderful George Rosenfeld.
Rachel Galvin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar, poet, and translator. Her poems and translations appear in The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. Her criticism appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket 2, MLN, and Modernism/modernity. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective.
Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collection, Date of Birth, won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2023. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain and A Hole to Breathe. Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere.