Open Mic with Abigail Raley
Celebrate Abigail’s newest book of poetry with us along with local writers sharing their own work. Bring old, new, strange or normal work of your own to share.
About the Book: "I wish I could be little again reading in my mother's lap, watching the koi make their circuitous routes, pumping the heart of the pond as if stuffed and hot with blood." Abigail Raley's Wet Specimen is a poetry collection dedicated to celebrating sensuality, tenderness, and the rewilding of the self. In her debut collection, Raley curates a portrait of desire that moves through ecoscapes, homescapes, and genderscapes. Lush with surreal metaphors and fiercely devoted to a corporeal lexicon, these poems echo slick humor while protesting gendered power dynamics. Through prose poems, free verse, and pantoums, Wet Specimen interrogates the primal capacity to want, to hate, and to love. Raley's inventive poems resist rigidity in favor of play, eroticism, and embodied discovery. Attentive to sickness, animals, love, and gender, Wet Specimen revels in a profound wonder of flesh, pus, and lust, encouraging the merging of self and body with the natural world.
About the Author: Abigail Raley is a poet and library worker from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has earned her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Hanging Loose Magazine, HAD, The Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere.
About the Book: "I wish I could be little again reading in my mother's lap, watching the koi make their circuitous routes, pumping the heart of the pond as if stuffed and hot with blood." Abigail Raley's Wet Specimen is a poetry collection dedicated to celebrating sensuality, tenderness, and the rewilding of the self. In her debut collection, Raley curates a portrait of desire that moves through ecoscapes, homescapes, and genderscapes. Lush with surreal metaphors and fiercely devoted to a corporeal lexicon, these poems echo slick humor while protesting gendered power dynamics. Through prose poems, free verse, and pantoums, Wet Specimen interrogates the primal capacity to want, to hate, and to love. Raley's inventive poems resist rigidity in favor of play, eroticism, and embodied discovery. Attentive to sickness, animals, love, and gender, Wet Specimen revels in a profound wonder of flesh, pus, and lust, encouraging the merging of self and body with the natural world.
About the Author: Abigail Raley is a poet and library worker from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has earned her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Hanging Loose Magazine, HAD, The Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere.
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