In-Store: Chet'la Sebree: Blue Opening w/ Eloisa Amezcua

Event guidelines:

• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• The event will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/A6kY2gFQZKo
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

“A profound poetic talent.”—Ada Limón

Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree’s brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins—of illness, of language, of the universe—as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is “unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.”

Chet'la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. She is the author of Fighting Is Like a Wife (Coffee House Press, April 2022) and From the Inside Quietly, inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. She serves on the faculty of the Randolph College MFA program.

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