Sophie Cabot Black, Sean Singer, and Camille Rankine

Thursday, March 26th @ 7:00 PM

Chin Music Featured Writers

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of THE DESCENT (2004) and THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF NATURE (1994), both published by Graywolf Press. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Fence, APR, Bomb, and The New Republic. She lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Sean Singer’s first book, DISCOGRAPHY, won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of an artists’ grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council
and a 2005 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives n New York City.

Camille Rankine received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Diagram and POOL: A Journal of Poetry. She lives in New York City and works as the Program and Communications Coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation, an organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

Introduction: Cecily Parks

Did I mention the touch? Happiness, I mean: plant your wing beat in my sleep—Buffalo-, goose-, and bearberries. Such an odd-berried cobbler in the oven are Cecily Parks’ poems of the earth’s jurisdictions, all the turnings inside. Here calf, here lamb, here a wish for a garden, to garden, be gardened. After tabulations of climates, soils, wyoming’s thrall, I began to forget, am shot through with field. I am waiting then, to serve the undone: astral, petal, not bad, but wayward. To be the next verse, the hole the shovel blade sings to. Self portrait as cow skull flush with lupine, self portrait as perch swirling in the parlor. I am the most benign unknown: slate length essays, honeysuckle’s clockwise, spine seam, jaw knot. Dear Aleotory, Dear Magnitude, the jam jar waiting for weed blooms in a waiting house like mine. Each a calligraphic constellation, Cecily Parks poems wait to serve the undone, fumble for a syntax to utter the tameness, the variations of beast and lover that are the earth. Lost here, she says, get tired of loneliness. Were I loved, I would be braver. Did I mention the touch? Garden, shake me something fierce. Cecily Parks.

Lewis Warsh, Cecily Parks, and Zachary Sussman

Thursday, March 12 @ 7:00pm

Chin Music Featured Poets

Lewis Warsh is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, TOUCH OF THE WHIP, AVENUE OF ESCAPE and TED’S FAVORITE SKIRT. He is co-editor of THE ANGEL HAIR ANTHOLOGY, editor and publisher of United Artists Books, and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn. A new book, INSEPARABLE: POEMS 1995-2005, was published by Granary Books in 2008.

Cecily Parks is the author of FIELD FOLLY SNOW (University of Georgia Press/VQR Poetry Series, 2008) and the chapbook COLD WORK (Poetry Society of America, 2005). She is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is working on a dissertation about swamps and American literature.

Zachary Sussman is the host and creator of the OnEarth Magazine poetry podcast, a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council. In addition to serving as Poetry Editor for Small Anchor Press, he works as the Coordinator of New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.