Hola, it’s 3:05 PM! Time to take a cafecito break!
Welcome to Poem in the Afternoon, read by a woman-identifying writer who is attending Miami Book Fair 2023. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair, 305 Cafecito (Miami’s Official Cafecito Break), and SWWIM, with Miami's favorite beverage—a cafecito, of course! We look forward to seeing you at the Fair.
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2023: Rachel DeWoskin, Sunday, 11/19, 2:00 pm, Room 8303
Transcript of poem: my god we learn hospital language fast what’s atrial, cardiac, filial, quick fibrillation, valve, root, arch, way past our pay grade here, sick, upside down until we spring you from this place that’s saving you, thus saving us, cut into what? replace, repair, slow blood down, wait! soak up what’s true slowly, this truth may pitch us into space so terrifying we can’t return. what else is there but you, laughing, saying they froze then thawed your body, brought back slow each pulse a hundred years we waited. how to close a sternum, stanza, suture, layer, wound? measure something like love, abstract, fine-tuned.
Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); two poetry collections, Two Menus (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and absolute animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005), about the years she spent in Beijing as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera. She has received a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, an American Library Association's Alex Award, and an Academy of American Poets Award, among others. Three of her books, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee, are being developed for feature film or television. DeWoskin's poems, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Baffler, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin is core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago and affiliated faculty in Jewish and East Asian Studies. She is on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).
From the book, absolute animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Permission granted by the author and press.
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