Prairie Lights

Prairie Lights and Rescue Press presents poets Sara Deniz Akant and Adrienne Raphel, who will read from their new collections of poetry published by Rescue Press!

Turkish-American poet and performer Sara Deniz Akant will read from Hyperphantasia, which was listed as a top poetry book of 2022 by the New York Times.  “Akant conjures the ancestral surrealism, something long before the word knew itself. The life we trust becomes a blast of light through a new and clear lens with this book. Do you also love to loiter in weird and brilliant poems until your purpose for being there becomes clear? Well, here we are; I am glad we found our way to these codes and keys of the Deniz Dimension.”–Ca Conrad

Akant is also the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015, winner of the Black Box award), Parades (Omnidawn 2014, winner of the chapbook prize), and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions 2014). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the CUNY Grad Center. She teaches poetry as Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, and co-curates the Kan Yama Kan reading series in Brooklyn.

Adrienne Raphel will read from Our Dark Academia. These poems are described as having “Strong Pandemic Energy” by poet Natalie Shapero who says, “Raphel’s work is cerebral, melodic, and discomfiting, expertly evoking contemporary disconnection: the mad chatter of machines and the infinite loop of the one-person call-and-response. These poems feel like what it feels like to think in a time when thinking feels unthinkable.”

Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Press); What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017), selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Atlantic.