Todd Colby is a Brooklyn-based poet and artist. Colby is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent book, Splash State, was published by The Song Cave in 2014. His writing and art have recently appeared in The Believer, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Dizzy Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Poetry Magazine.
Poet and essayist Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press), What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press), and Crown (Ravenna Press). She is also the author of the recent chapbooks When We Were Fearsome and Wild Apples from Ethel Zine & Micro-Press. Joanna has taught writing and literature at several colleges, and she currently teaches courses for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, Meredith College, and her own company, Muse Writing & Creative Support. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, as well as South Dakota Review, Zócalo Public Square, Christian Century, Poetry International, and other journals. She lives in Durham, North Carolina
Jessica Q. Stark is a poet and educator living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020 and was named one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2020" in the Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (forthcoming 2021, The Offending Adam). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Carolina Quarterly, wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Comics Editor for Honey Literary. She teaches writing at the University of North Florida.
Julia Story is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande Books), The Trapdoor (Dancing Girl Press); Julie the Astonishing (Sixth Finch Books); and Spinster for Hire (The Word Works). Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Sixth Finch, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.
The Friends of the Carlyle Campbell Library
Co-sponsored by the Meredith College English Department
with support of the Mary Lynch Johnson Endowment
present
How It Started / How It's Going:
A Poetry Reading by Todd Colby, Joanna Penn Cooper, Jessica Q. Stark, and Julia Story
Click Here to Watch the Recording
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Savage Pageant by
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Studies. Film. SAVAGE PAGEANT recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, SAVAGE PAGEANT reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.
The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis by
Poetry. Fiction. "Everything in these gathered pieces—vatic as poetry, confidential as prose—is a music broadcast from the imminent future, say, five minutes from now. Here, even memory has been subtly, irreversibly changed by events just now underway. The music is troubled and troubling. It is certainly true."—Donald Revell "Balancing outward and inward looking, playfulness and vulnerability, strange intimacy and gauzy disconnection, Joanna Penn Cooper's THE ITINERANT GIRL'S GUIDE TO SELF-HYPNOSIS builds a moody and tender ladder. These lyric shorts recall the New York School with their arrays of noticings and exultancies and knobbly, vivid particulars, yet they also feel wholly fresh and surprising, and of Cooper's own nimble and provocative making. This is a wonderful collection."—Paula McLain
Splash State by
Poetry. An extended love letter, Todd Colby's sixth collection SPLASH STATE is filled with humor and charm. These poems are as concerned with aging, time, being, and death as they are with eliminating "the need for anxious circumstances" with facts, instructions, and advice. From extolling the uses of "Shark's Paw" and "Fink Leaf" to "how to look like everything is okay in photographs," Colby's poems opt for the personal and generous, even when his tongue is firmly planted in cheek. If melancholy is just around the corner, these poems will walk with you in the opposite direction. "Todd Colby's poetry radiates the joy of receiving a long-awaited letter. He ends an early poem, 'Sweetie,' with the line 'Let me let me know let me know soon let me know soon Sweetie.' It now seems that Sweetie has replied. In his new collection, SPLASH STATE, he tells us 'You will no longer need a hushed, barely audible tone / to confess your inadequacies because you will no longer have any / to confess'—the ideal state that Auden hoped would 'make us well / without confession of the ill.' With this pleasure comes responsibility, but it's the responsibility to remain in joy.' There won't be a need / for codes or inane principles, because you'll always / be too radiant and purposeful for that.' In SPLASH STATE, a perfect title for the state of calm eagerness he writes out of, Colby discovers that 'There are mornings, and then there are / golden glimpses of something totally / amazing like awe or coffee,' and then that 'Morning will never be called off / due to budgetary constraints, or even heartbreak. / By afternoon, there will be plush green pillows, / strewn on the lawn waiting for my body. / I can hardly wait.' The rest of us no longer have to wait. This dazzling collection confirms Colby's status as one of the finest and funniest poets of his generation."—John Ashbery "I read Todd Colby's SPLASH STATE and I'm here to say that it makes the world better. I mean this because this is a monumental book and in this book, in this stack of love poems, we see that the Romantic has a place again in the everyday, like the 'courtyard' that 'sparkles puppy yellow' with sunlight, the 'Simple Times' when 'bones softened the cars,' and an I that 'blooms out over Brooklyn' are all part of what we do this whole thing for: life. If you like Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, William Blake, and Wallace Stevens, then you are going to like this book. Or I mean to say, that this book is a spell, a love spell. And if you want a book to carry with you when no one seems to care, when no one seems to be your friend, well then, you've found it, it's this book, this book is your love spell, this book is your friend."—Dorothea Lasky
Spinster for Hire by
Poetry. Funny and fiery, this second collection will restore your faith in the power of small stories to shift our minds to bigger knowing. Says Emily Kendal Frey, "The voice here is friends with its sadness and yet we are yanked, with fierce exultance, up and through joy, too. Mashed and battered, held and protected, these words are life, and a life that asks, 'What harms us more than our hope?'" "Cinematic, darkly funny, & seductively sad--watching Julia Story cut these twisty, glinting shapes out of silence is like watching a kirigami artist summon a life-size funnel cloud out of a single sheet of paper. SPINSTER FOR HIRE is sublime--so full of finely-tuned truth, it practically levitates."--Karyna McGlynn "SPINSTER FOR HIRE is an antidote to modern noise--a long, late-night walk that leaves us wondering how we got here. Against a backdrop of existential isolation, Story points out constellations. Maybe they mean something, and if not, these poems shepherd us through the mystery."--Rob McDonald
Post Moxie by
Winner of the 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Dan Chiassonn From "The Above Song": Foie gras has been outlawed. So has gravitas, faux grass, middle class. Soon: the past. Julia Story lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
What Is a Domicile by
Poetry. Women's Studies. "Joanna Penn Cooper's debut collection, WHAT IS A DOMICILE, interrogates the philosophical geographies of female/human embodiment. With the hypnotic languor of time-lapse photography, these dreamy poems, 'lived by the movement of cloud shadow,' document the quotidian rituals of moving through domestic, urban, psychological, emotional, aesthetic, and textual spaces. 'I've cured myself of being / so meta, or else I've embraced it,' Cooper writes in these alternately lush and witty poems, as she wrestles with the art of '[h]ow to wear the crown of love and fresh pita for lunch and let it go.' Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, spaces and lives nest and layer one inside the other—strange palimpsests over other days, hours, histories, ghosts—culminating in the Coke-can sized life growing within the speaker, who forms the vulnerable core from which these existential questions ripple with a gorgeously aching intensity: 'You are in love with someone you just met, who's lying there, too. You barely touch, but you're also the same person. Part of the movie is a tiny spine, tiny kidneys. A four-chambered heart. Look at all the wonder.'"—Lee Ann Roripaugh
Riot in the Charm Factory by
The best of Todd Colby's Soft Skull poetry collections Ripsnort and Cush are here with new poetry and prose. This is simultaneously a Best Of and a launching into new directions for this intensely high-energy poet. He is a spontaneous, lively performer, and a sharp, funny poetic voice. Colby makes serious sport of language, showing its basis in the body's impulses and its mutable meanings, explained Ann Powers in The New York Times.
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