In-Store: Albert Abonado: Field Guide for Accidents w/ Jason Koo

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
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• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/oBDtKs7fzS8
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SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES
An irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience.
Born in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly “American” nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents’s speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado’s poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, two identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.
The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.
For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for “fitting in.” What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.

Albert Abonado is the author of Jaw (Sundress Publications). He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, Hobart, Waxwing, Triquarterly, and others. Albert currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and the Rochester Institute for Technology. He is the former Director of Adult Programs at Writers & Books.

Jason Koo is a second-generation Korean American poet, educator, editor and nonprofit director. He is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: No Rest, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, More Than Mere Light, America's Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. His work has been published in Best American Poetry 2022, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Village Voice and Yale Review, among other places, and won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. He is an associate teaching professor of English and the director of creative writing at Quinnipiac University and the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets. For his work with Brooklyn Poets, Koo was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine.

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