The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Alyson Gold Weinberg to celebrate her new poetry collection, Bellow & Hiss. With an introduction by Courtney Sexton, Co-Founder, The Inner Loop. Book signing and reception to follow.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required below.
Alyson Gold Weinberg is an award-winning Washington, D.C. poet, playwright, speechwriter, and ghostwriter. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including december, One Art, Halfway Down the Stairs, WWPH Writes, among others. She is a 2022 Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Poetry Prize finalist and a 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize finalist, judged by Carl Phillips. Alyson’s play, Object Relations, had its live-streamed debut during the pandemic to benefit mental health equity. She is the ghostwriter of five non-fiction books.
About the Book
“Riding shotgun with Oedipus, your mother, and the pothole in your heart,” Bellow & Hiss navigates generational suffering and hurtles headlong toward reverie. The collection’s knowing “I” interrogates the dark gift of childhood trauma, the nature of family, and the weaving together of identity. Bellow & Hiss asks: “Have you ever been properly pruned? A love equation carved into your skin?” What does it mean to bear fruit from rotten seeds? Tucked among the branches and brambles of this collection are revelations about growing up and upward, spiritual endurance, and the art of creating oneself. The “scarred arms” in Bellow & Hiss—of drowning Ophelias, anthropomorphic dieffenbachias, and pandemic Penelopes—reach toward the light, “gasping for living things.”
Advance Praise for Bellow & Hiss:
“Alyson Gold Weinberg’s Bellow & Hiss sings with a poignant ache and beauty that makes music in its language and stark imagery. These poems are historic, gritty, and deeply personal—coiled in wild earth and cosmically bittersweet moments.” –Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan
“This collection abounds with empathy, intelligence and insight … navigates worlds, at times ebullient, often fraught with doubt and fear, and always redeemed by love. Mostly, Bellow & Hiss is a poignant reminder of what it means to be alive.” –Sean Murphy, author of The Blackened Blues and Rhapsodies in Blue
“Alyson Gold Weinberg’s vision seems succinctly punk somehow with sharp shiny edges emerging from dark spaces. What it all adds up to are lines and images that pull you in and poems, which from the plain surface of the page, inspire you to move.” –Jose Padua, author of A Short History of Monsters