Poets Shane Book and Mark Levine will read from their work.  Shane Book will read from All Black Everything (Kuhl House Poets, 2023). Mark Levine will read from Sound Fury (Univ of Iowa Press).
“All Black Everything proposes an expansive, global poetics, which is equally a poetics of Black diasporan fluency. All Black’s poems ride the crosscurrents of history and popular culture through African America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As references whirl and constellate, All Black’s language grows dense and intricate. It gathers color and image. It acquires regional inflections, absorbs a riches of sound, and riffs on proverbial wisdom. The global reach of these poems works to collect and synthesize fragments of culture. Connections are established across time and distance. This synthesis happens as we read, and the rhythms of Black language and music become its measure.”—Kaie Kellough

Shane Book is also the author of Congotronic (Iowa, 2014), winner of the Archibald Lampman Award and finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Griffin Poetry Prize. Book was a 2023 visiting professor of poetry at the Writers’ Workshop. He is an associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Mark Levine will read from Sound Fury (University of Iowa Press).  “Mark Levine has an extraordinary nose, taste, and mouth for lives low and abject, filthy talkers and doers. Sound Fury—its nouns pressed together loudly and furiously—is distinguished by its intense, continually revved-up virtuosity of voice, its absolutely right pitch, idiom, line cuts, and rhyme, and its large cast of ‘scavenging muckers.’ Levine’s language is unstoppably vigorous and his wit sly; his distinctiveness is his genius for a devastating inwardness. The postmodern disenchantment with the Anthropocene, that farce of human greed and conceit, finds its latest, most confident tracker here.”—Cal Bedient

Mark Levine is the author of Capital, Debt, Enola Gay, The Wilds, and Travels of Marco. His poetry has appeared in anthologies including American Poets in the Twenty-First Century and American Hybrid. His is also the author of the nonfiction work, F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century.  Levine is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Levine lives in Iowa City.