Jake Fournier will read from his new poetry collection, Punishment Bag, and will be joined in conversation with Alicia Wright. Described as “In conversation with collections like John Ashbery’s Some Trees and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium,” Punishment Bag is “a daring poetry debut that carves its own unsettling territory” (simonandschuster.com). D. A. Powell, author of Low Hanging Fruit, praises Punishment Bag as “a book marvelously held together by the attempt to see what can often only be felt,” while Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of Aux/Arc Trypt Ich: Poppycock and Assphodel and Winter; A Night of Dark Trees, says: “With a delicate and complex ear, a sly wit, and acute self-awareness, these poems move like a snake in the grass, muscled and inexplicable. The gift here is in the unsettling, in the eliding slippage and its attendant, alighting mind. We are left a bit dazed and dazzled, lead to and left entranced at the eerie heart where that dearth of understanding flows from and moves us all.”

Jake Fournier is a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Alicia Wright is originally from Rome, Georgia, and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Literary Arts. She is the editor of Annulet and publisher of Annulet Editions, and lives in Iowa City, where she works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review.