Lauren K. Watel & Chelsea Rathburn
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Lauren K. Watel and Chelsea Rathburn will visit City Lights on Saturday, October 24th at 3:00pm. Lauren will read from her debut book of prose poetry, Book of Potions, and Chelsea from her new poetry collection, Broken Houses.
Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.
Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions capture a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.
By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us.
“It wasn’t breaking and entering, / my parents swore, if a door / was already open,” Rathburn writes of a childhood spent slipping into construction sites for “furtive tours” of half-built homes. For the young poet, ‘For sale’ signs, dollhouses, and model homes represent wonder and possibility. Over time, though, this early wonder gives way to an awareness of both class difference and how easily our houses can be destroyed—whether by natural disasters or human forces—and with them our sense of stability and self.
Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father’s placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.
At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.
Lauren K. Watel's debut collection BOOK of POTIONS won the Kathryn A Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. Her potions, poetry, fiction, essays and translations have appeared widely. She earned an M.A. in English from Hollins College and a Ph.D. in Women's Studies from Emory University, mainly to avoid gainful employment. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy” book released by Louisiana State University Press in February 2019. Rathburn’s first full-length collection, The Shifting Line, won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and her second collection, A Raft of Grief, was published by Autumn House Press in 2013.
In a 2019 feature, NPR called Rathburn’s work “arresting” and “a gentle whirlwind.” Her poems have appeared in many of the nation’s most esteemed journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently an associate professor of English-Creative Writing at Mercer University.
In March 2019, Rathburn was appointed poet laureate of Georgia, and in 2021 she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. For more information on the poet laureateship and literary arts in Georgia, visit the Georgia Council for the Arts.
Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.
Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions capture a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.
By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us.
“It wasn’t breaking and entering, / my parents swore, if a door / was already open,” Rathburn writes of a childhood spent slipping into construction sites for “furtive tours” of half-built homes. For the young poet, ‘For sale’ signs, dollhouses, and model homes represent wonder and possibility. Over time, though, this early wonder gives way to an awareness of both class difference and how easily our houses can be destroyed—whether by natural disasters or human forces—and with them our sense of stability and self.
Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father’s placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.
At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.
Lauren K. Watel's debut collection BOOK of POTIONS won the Kathryn A Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. Her potions, poetry, fiction, essays and translations have appeared widely. She earned an M.A. in English from Hollins College and a Ph.D. in Women's Studies from Emory University, mainly to avoid gainful employment. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy” book released by Louisiana State University Press in February 2019. Rathburn’s first full-length collection, The Shifting Line, won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and her second collection, A Raft of Grief, was published by Autumn House Press in 2013.
In a 2019 feature, NPR called Rathburn’s work “arresting” and “a gentle whirlwind.” Her poems have appeared in many of the nation’s most esteemed journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently an associate professor of English-Creative Writing at Mercer University.
In March 2019, Rathburn was appointed poet laureate of Georgia, and in 2021 she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. For more information on the poet laureateship and literary arts in Georgia, visit the Georgia Council for the Arts.
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Where is it happening?
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherCity Lights Bookstore
