Join Jennifer Franklin, Program Director, and Sophia Bannister, as we welcome Catherine Barnett, Malachi Black, and Ishion Hitchinson as they read from their new collections.
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Human Hours, winner of the Believer Book Award, and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in New York City and teaches at NYU.
Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light, Four Way Books, 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
Praise for the Books:
“Barnett’s fourth collection applies a quirky eye and sparkling intelligence to the topic of loneliness.”—The New York Times Book Review
“The stunning latest from Barnett (Human Hours) blends the witty and the philosophical to offer a study in ‘restricted fragile materials,’ or the bewildering condition of being alive. Urbane, perceptive, and starkly humane, these are poems of quiet alarm, at once companionable and singular.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“There is a devastating down-to-earth marriage of wit and elegy in Barnett’s transcendent fourth collection, which opens in childhood. . . .”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
“Through poems of startling clarity and delicate humor, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space grapples with the ontological absurdity of our large-scale and everyday failures, finding space to elegize and celebrate both what we can and cannot control.”—James Ciano, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Black’s powerful second collection immerses readers in the gritty New York City of his youth… crafting intimate narratives with expansive existential musings…. Throughout, Black transforms memory from historical fact to lived experience… these poems shine with a melancholic beauty.” — Publishers Weekly
“This is a book of great, life-making lyricism. Every word of Indirect Light sings.” — Shane McCrae
“Here, as in a seance, Malachi Black calls forth spirits from a hazardous youth in the opioid-infected suburbs of New York City, a youth measured in lovers and users, in the early deaths of friends, in evenings spent in back-alleys…. Indirect Light is not a book about redemption; instead, it is a book about a more complicated grace that might arise from thought, memory, memorial, and art. Black’s technical skill, his mastery of the music of poetry, is as breathtaking as the intelligence and feeling that live in these poems.”— Kevin Prufer
“Reading Malachi Black’s Indirect Light feels like being on the receiving end of Tennyson’s In Memoriam shot through a many-prismed lens, as the intensity of the collection’s longing reaches toward many persons, its grieving a flowering out…. Black’s much-anticipated second book is a significant contribution to the ongoing tradition of the elegiac form.” — Cate Marvin
Ishion Hutchinson’s collection was a FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, Library Journal, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and The Washington Post
“Hutchinson is the most verbally gifted of the younger poets now reaching maturity. . . but the writing is charged with a passion rare since the salad days of Geoffrey Hill. . . Hutchinson can hardly write a line without charging it with gunpowder . . . I’d give up whole books by many poets for Hutchinson’s lines.” —William Logan, New Criterion
“Hutchinson decolonizes the epic in this chronicle of West Indian soldiers . . . Interwoven with episodes from the life of a Jamaican schoolboy in the 1990s named Godspeed, these soldiers’ histories contribute a new chapter to the story of modern poetry.” —Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post
“One of the signature strengths of Hutchinson’s work has been his willingness to ransack literature or forms and diction . . . Drawing from the long tradition of colonists and their language to document the exploits of exploited Jamaican volunteers to the British Imperial cause, Hutchinson makes space for the people his poem memorializes. Sounding the tradition, he makes it free and remixes the elements, putting everything in service to his own shining ends.” —Michael Autrey, Booklist (Starred Review)
“What Hutchinson recovers of these soldiers, then, is not some imagined specificity of their individual characters and traits, but rather the way in which their wounds, lives, and deaths persist . . . and it is Hutchinson’s caution and the respect with which he approaches his subject—never cheating, never pretending to know more than he does, while nonetheless never able to believe his subjects truly disappeared into oblivion—that allows us to feel viscerally that strange entwining of the forgotten dead and the present.” —Phil Klay, Commonweal
“A virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief.” —Leila Greening, The Arts Desk
“[A] potent, memorializing third collection . . . Hutchinson adeptly blends time and events to create a lexically rich, glintingly lyric set of counterpoints. . . These vigorous poems are an epitaph for overlooked combatants and a way of honoring the long shadows cast by a post-colonial inheritance.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions defies category—not with philosophy or doctrine, but through illuminating imagery and pace. And, here, the reader must be ready to engage a deeper truth this work brings to light, which seems to be asking through innuendo, Were Jamaican troops fighting in the Middle East during the First World War silenced? What at first may seem symbolic and totemic grows into a profound language embodying a rhythm that is cultural and personal. The subtle details—the officers are British and the Caribbean soldiers, low-ranking fodder dying in the name of the crown—become haunting brushstrokes on a tonal canvas. This poet shows how a sense of place travels as images of home and voices in the head and heart; dreams of the Caribbean Sea become overlays upon maps of sandy battlefields. Such realities are embedded throughout School of Instructions, and in this sense the title is the first trope of irony in a masterful work.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
“Ishion Hutchinson draws on all the conventions of epic—the proper names and epitaphs, the lists, the materiel, the violence—only to undo them. Instead he reveals the striking language and singular consciousness of his protagonists as they make their way through an ancient landscape they already know as shaped by eternity. By its end, this moving, humane, long poem floods the reader with a sense of their living presence and destiny.” —Susan Stewart, author of The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture
“‘Source of echo/madman of prophecies,’ chants the over-voice in Ishion Hutchinson’s majestic School of Instructions. That’s how this lyric-epic works, picking up signals from the Bible, Blake, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Geoffrey Hill, and Jamaican dub music. To honor the West Indian soldiers who fought for England in the Great War, Hutchinson splices the memory of the Black soldiers into the story of Godspeed, his modern Jamaican ‘boyself’ enduring thrashings at his ‘school of instructions.’ With this radical poem, Hutchinson leaps into the ranks of the visionary company.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth
“School of Instructions is poetry on a larger scale than we are accustomed to, echoing the scope of David Jones’s In Parenthesis and the verbal intensity of Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott. Hutchinson seizes our attention with the drama a little-known campaign in the Great War and never lets go, through intimacy with an individual named Godspeed. The work unfolds in counterpoint with memories of Jamaica and allusions to classic literature and the Bible, giving us a view of cataclysmic history from ground level, in a voice that soars and repeats and advances like the finest music.” —Robert Morgan, author of In the Snowbird Mountain and Other Stories
Photo Credit of Ishion: Beowulf Sheehan
