Prairie Lights

Poet Jessica Laser will read from her new book, Planet Drill. “In an era of disintegration, frack and melt, any human who wants to move away from habits of harm must feel for new ways to inhabit Planet Drill, using our signature bodily function: language. In Jessica Laser’s Planet Drill, human language is like the slime-mold quietly recreating the subway map of Tokyo: deft, resourceful, pliant, responsive, and finally, collectively, wise.”–Joyelle McSweeney

Jessica Laser is the author of two books of poems: Planet Drill (Futurepoem Books, 2022), winner of the inaugural Other Futures Award, and Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Her work has most recently appeared in The Drift, Changes Review and The Yale Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley.