Come out for a very special reading on our anniversary eve! Philly poets Maya Pindyck and Taije Silverman will share from their latest collections Impossible Belonging and Now You Can Join the Others, and transport listeners on a dizzying, essential journey through time and space(s), both real and imagined.
Maya and Taije will be weaving writing prompts in between their readings and asking audience members to write creative responses that will connect to those readings. Please bring notebooks and pencils to the event.
Post-reading drinks at the new Forin Cafe, 2525 Frankford
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Impossible Belonging weaves personal and family histories with contemporary events and politics in the U.S. and Israel/Palestine, asking what it means to belong -- to our bodies, cultures, histories, and each other. In vivid and lyrical language, Pindyck explores how we lay claim to and surrender identities shaped by historical trauma, diaspora, motherhood, statehood, and the Anthropocene.
Now You Can Join the Others, the second collection of poetry by Taije Silverman, traces the absurdities of desire, the shifting nature of grief, and the concentric circles of history and myth that ripple around motherhood and marriage. Set in cities around the world and on real and metaphorical islands, narratives slip between centuries and spaces: a Philadelphia bedroom and Berlin’s Jewish Museum, a castle in Naples and a Chuck E. Cheese. Scenes of sexual and racial violence force an interrogation of words through a multiplicity of voices, and the othering of self becomes a shared, even reassuring alienation. From a sixteenth-century philosopher to a lecherous innkeeper in Modena, from the founding of Athens to the hatching of cicadas, this book investigates human, geological, and cyclical forms of time, suggesting that they are as material and evasive as language. Intricate, unexpected, and probing, Now You Can Join the Others is a radically candid, revelatory collection.
Biographies:
Maya Pindyck's third book of poems, Impossible Belonging, won the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2023. She is also the author of Emoticoncert (Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press), winner of the Many Voices Project Award. A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers, a book she co-authored with Ruth Vinz, was published by Bloomsbury in fall 2022. Her work has earned her a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and grants from the Historic House Trust of NYC and Abortion Conversation Projects. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design.
Taije Silverman's second book of poems, Now You Can Join the Others, was published by LSU Press this fall. Her first book of poems, Houses Are Fields, was published in 2009, and her translations of the Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Honors include a Fulbright Fellowship, the W.K. Rose Award from Vassar College, the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review, the Emory University Poetry Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, poems in the Best American Poetry series, and residencies from MacDowell and Yaddo. She lives in Philadelphia.