Bird in Hand is delighted to present this joint poetry reading with Jasmine Gibson and Chris Nealon, both authors of recent poetry collections.

A BEAUTY HAS COME by Jasmine Gibson is a collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space through soundscape.

ALL ABOUT YOU by Chris Nealon builds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic “we”: “imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh – full of chatter – / Hush now / Come on, let’s run – ”

In conversation, both collections paint a visionary, anti-capitalist portrait out of writing from the physical limitations of lockdown. We feel fortunate to bring this conversation off the page, and hope you can join us!

Christopher Nealon teaches American literature, aesthetic theory, and the intellectual histories that bear on the history of poetry. He also regularly teaches courses that explore how the humanities have conceived of capitalism. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1997, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008. He has written three books of criticism: Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001), The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011), and Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital (2023). He is also the author of five books of poetry, including The Shore, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume of poems is All About You (2024).

Jasmine Gibson is a writer, poet and psych worker. She is interested in liberation from the psychic bondages of racial capitalism. She is the author of two full length collections, Don’t Let Them See Me Like This (Nightboat,2018) and A Beauty Has Come (Nightboat, 2023). Her published work has or is set to appear in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Social Text Journal, Ms. Magazine, The New Yorker and The Poetry Foundation.

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