OUR HUMAN SHORES Midwest Tour - Josh Fomon, BJ Soloy, Julien Rouse @ The Atlas Collective
Schedule
Sun, 15 Feb, 2026 at 01:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
The Atlas Collective - Brews & Books | Moline, IL
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Free Reading at The Atlas Collective, featuring Josh Fomon, BJ Soloy, and Julien Rouse. 1-2pm Sunday, Feb. 15. Don't sleep!About OUR HUMAN SHORES
Our Human Shores explores living in the Anthropocene, the
ecological disasters life faces, and the barriers and inequality
society faces in trying to create a better and livable world.
Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted
within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning
making, faith in people and institutions, and death through
lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics.
Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human
Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse. Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity
through extinction.
“In Our Human Shores, Josh Fomon takes on the difficult situation of our country and world in a voice that vibrates between prophetic and private, apocalyptic and lyrical. If it's Whitmanesque it's the Whitman of the radical Latin American poets. Fomon's poems mourn, hope, and struggle. His language is sensuous, glistering. When I read it, I can feel the words in my mouth.” —Johannes Goransson, author of The New Quarantine
BIOS:
Josh Fomon is the author of Though We Bled Meticulously, also published by Black Ocean. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Afternoon Visitor, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, The Georgia Review, jubilat, mercury firs, Poetry Northwest, TYPO, and Yalobusha Review. He lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in Seattle.
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BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (2025, Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters (2016, New Michigan Press). There’s also some recent work in Gigantic Sequins, At Length, and Painted Bride Quarterly.
He somehow lives in Des Moines, Iowa, home of the Whatever the Hell, where he teaches at a community college and a women's prison while weeping daily into the news's dirty hair.
Some marketing material Birth Center in Corporate Woods:
https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/birth-center-in-corporate-woods/
https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2019/06/bj-soloy-our-pornography-and-other.html
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Julien Rouse lives in Des Moines with their partner and son. They have had poems published in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Arsenic Lobster, decomP, and Sprung Formal, among others, and they have work forthcoming in Peripheries, a journal out of Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Their chapbook, Boy, was published by Dancing Girl Press. Their most recent work, exploring trans identity, place, and belonging, was written as a capstone project for the One Iowa Leadership Institute. Julien holds an MFA from the University of Montana.
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Where is it happening?
The Atlas Collective - Brews & Books, 18 St & 5 Ave, 498 18th St, Moline, IL 61265, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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