The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore welcome poets Jodie Hollander (Nocturne) and Christina Pugh (Stardust Media) for a virtual reading from their latest collections.
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Jodie Hollander’s work has appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, PN Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, The Hudson Review, The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The Best Australian Poems of 2011, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015. Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, was published with Liverpool University Press & Oxford University Press. Her second collection, Nocturne, will be published with the Liverpool & Oxford University Press in the spring of 2023. Hollander is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship in South Africa. She is also the originator of ‘Poetry in the Parks,’ in conjunction with several National Parks and Monuments in the US. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Christina Pugh has published five books of poems including Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and Perception (Four Way Books, 2017), named a top poetry book of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and many other publications. Her sixth book of poetry, The Right Hand, is forthcoming in 2024 from Tupelo Press. Her essays have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Twentieth Century Literature, and other venues; and her book of essays, On Ghosts and the Overplus, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press’ “Poets on Poetry” series in 2024. Pugh has received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, as well as awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Bogliasco Foundation. A recent Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
About the Books
Set in a technicolour world of dreams, ghosts, classical music, and Key West storms, Jodie Hollander’s compelling second collection charts the emotional journey of the daughter of a professional classical pianist. These bold and arresting poems, rich with musicality, and fierce in their emotional honesty, chart the complicated repercussions of family dysfunction and musical obsession while traversing the landscape of the human condition and exploring the need for refuge in the natural world.
Christina Pugh’s fifth book of poems explores the technologies both ancient and new that inhabit our contemporary cultural moment. Mapping an uncanny journey through the clusters of media we encounter daily but seldom stop to contemplate, Pugh’s focused descriptions, contrasting linguistic textures, and acute poetic music become multifarious sources of beauty, disruption, humor, and hurt. Here, Netflix and YouTube share space with eighteenth-century paintings, Italian graffiti, ballet, Kurt Cobain’s recordings, and even a collection of rocks. Whether technology is a vessel for joy or grief in these poems, it is always an expression of our continuing desire to invent and to mediate. At once personal archive and cultural barometer, Stardust Media traces the moving constellations of life in the distant twenty-first century, “a kaleidoscope / . . . half-filled with sky-blue glass-cut blossoming, / then labored to crystallize.”