The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore welcome poets Natasha Sajé (The Future Will Call You Something Else) and Courtney LeBlanc (Her Whole Bright Life) for a reading and discussion of their brand new books. Moderated by Sandra Beasley. Book signing to follow.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required. Please view and agree to [link id=’2132036′ text=’COVID Policies’] before attending our live events.
Natasha Sajé is the author of five books of poems; a postmodern poetry handbook (Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory); and a memoir-in-essays. Her work has been honored with the Robert Winner and Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards, a Fulbright fellowship, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, and the Utah Book Award. Terroir: Love, Out of Place was a finalist for Pen, Lambda, CMLP, and Indie Book Awards, and was awarded first prizes by Foreword Reviews and IPPY. Sajé is a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. in Writing Program and lives in Washington, D.C.
Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the full-length collections Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize, Write Bloody, 2023), Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (Riot in Your Throat, 2021) and Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). She is a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow (2022) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at courtneyleblanc.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.
About the Books
In the singularity of form, the poems in The Future Will Call You Something Else live time. These poems make a ripe and vivid present, imagine a past, or both. Questioning the known and pointing to the unknown, they acknowledge transience, including that of language. White space often serves to punctuate, while Sajé’s wit and play are leavening. The variety of subjects and forms, as well as the many poems of address, invite the reader to join intimate conversations. Preoccupied with place (Utah figures prominently) as well as time, this book creates a climate of its own.
Her Whole Bright Life is a collection of poems that weave together the trauma and exhaustion of a life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father. Love and hunger intertwine and become inseparable as the poet grapples to find, and listen, to both. With a distinct and feminist voice, this collection delves into a life now lived without a beloved parent, while trying to survive a pandemic, and battling demons that have lived inside her for most of her life. With both fierceness and tenderness, we see a woman trying to find her place within her own body and within an ever-changing world. This collection of poems is both an elegy and an anthem – praising both those who’ve been lost and those who remain.