Abraham Smith and Brian Kubarycz

We are thrilled to welcome Abraham Smith and Brian Kubarycz to The King's English to celebrate their new poetry collections, Perdition and Surgencies.

Tickets for this event are $5 and all proceeds go directly to our partner non-profit, Brain Food Books.

If you cannot make this event, signed copies may be ordered from our website.

Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy from The King's English.

About the books:

Perdition is the debut collection from Medieval scholar Brian Kubarycz. Conjuring dread without the jump scares, each story focuses not on an action but on a single arresting vision. In "The Bends," a hunting expedition devolves into a disorienting search for a lost woman, while in "Buckets," human bodies fall from the sky.

These stories are dark and moody, but despite their darkness, they do not lack humor, though the laughter tends to come from the balconies as in "Denomination," where a true believer seeks salvation by swallowing scripture and corn whiskey.

Frightening and cerebral, these stories create an atmosphere that is equal parts psychological and visceral. Each fiction results in what can only be qualified as terror, and the air in each is "filled with the very instant of it." Singular in theme and surprising in musicality, Perdition is a bright light that entrances the reader, but also the monstrous things lurking behind the light in the grim dark.

Surgencies

For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Time Earley, Surgencies responds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. In each line Abraham Smith includes an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow. Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster.

In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast.

Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get honey-skulled.

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