A reading and reception in celebration of the launch of Boomhouse by Summer J. Hart and GHOST :: SEEDS by Sebastian Merrill, two debut poetry collections that touch on intersecting themes of myth and identity.
This in-person event will be held at Lofty Pigeon Books. The books will be available for purchase, and the authors will be signing copies.
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About Boomhouse
Boomhouse thrums with loss, with complicated love, with fortitude. The poems travel a chain of rivers and lakes from the great timber stands of Canada to the dying mill towns of Maine, bending and rippling through history, oral accounts, superstitious customs, family lore and memory. Summer J. Hart navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler. She weaves stories and spells from the most delicate and indelible details.
About GHOST :: SEEDS
Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his “ghost,” the “girl-ghost” of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.
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About Summer J. Hart
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. Her written and visual narratives are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. Summer is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press). She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellowship at MacDowell. Her poetry can be found in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press), Bedfellows, Denver Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere.
About Sebastian Merrill
Sebastian Merrill’s debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press and was selected by Ellen Doré Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poetry from Friends of Writers. His work has appeared in The Common, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Passages North, and wildness. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshop, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.