Poetry Reading with Tina Chang, Tishani Doshi, Nathalie Handal & Erika Meitner

About this event

BPL Presents is excited to welcome four poets with new books. Tina Chang reads from Lion, Tishani Doshi reads from Egrets, While War, Nathalie Handal reads from Roma Roam, and Erika Meitner reads from Assembled Audience. In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang collaborates with multi-hyphenate women artists who create across multiple mediums: text, illustration, painting, video, sculpture. Artists include Haena Yoo, Hồng-Ân Trương, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, an Asian American woman who was murdered during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes, sparking cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority. Tishani Doshi’s Egrets, While War reflects on aging, mortality, and survival in a world where violence and the beauty of nature coexist. Unflinching, yet tender, the poems in Egrets, While War exist in a world of dualities, holding “desire in one hand, suffering in another.” Meditations on loss and larger world conflicts move alongside personal experiences, vulnerable self-reflections, and a deep longing for “what’s wild / and pulsing.” Nathalie Handal’s ninth collection, Roma Roam, chronicles an unraveling after the discovery of a lover’s betrayals. These bold poems explore power, freedom, water, memory, and “how / we hold history in our splitting bodies.” The speaker opens herself to the opacity of human connections where “passion can be a seafarer, / a daily resurrection” and “faithfulness / a long hesitation.” Who—or what—do we betray when we roam other bodies? What roles do history, religion, art, and culture play in our infidelities? Erika Meitner’s Assembled Audience explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world. “What does it mean to gather together?” asks this fervent, frank…

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